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Many Of The Bahamas' Public School Teachers: "...either cannot teach or only want a job"
Related to country: Bahamas

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Sands: Many Teachers Only Want a Job -
By Journal Staff Writer:
Nassau, Bahamas -



As thousands of public school teachers return to the classroom today, an education official admitted on Sunday that many of them, though qualified, either cannot teach or only want a job. "Oftentimes we have teachers who just want a job. They are qualified but they just want a job," admitted Education Director Lionel Sands.

"When a teacher comes to us qualified, we assume that this teacher is also a teacher who has all of those other [teaching] attributes in them, but we won’t know that until afterwards and one good thing that we do have in our system is that we do rescind appointments."

Mr. Sands, who was a special guest Sunday on the Jones & Co. radio talk show hosted by Wendall Jones and Godfrey Eneas, said while some individuals have the pedagogical skills, they are just unable to teach.

"We do have in our system an appraisal of teachers, and when teachers are appraised there are some critical areas that we evaluate them on," Sands explained.

"They may be excellent in a particular area that may not necessarily be a part of what we are actually looking at in terms of them being able to teach, but when it comes to a point [or area] where they are able to teach, they are graded very heavily on those areas. If that teacher cannot in those critical [teaching] areas arrive at a 4 or 5 point scale then they go home."

Asked yesterday if he was "satisfied" with the crop of teachers in the government’s educational system, Sands said all teachers must be fully trained at an accredited institution and they must have no less than a Bachelor’s degree in education and the necessary skills to teach.

He noted, however, that one of the things that might be "missing" is humanity. "You don’t learn in university how to be humane to a child that you are providing the service for," Sands said.

"You have to want to be a teacher to have that, and so that may be a part of the problem where we are hiring qualified teachers but some may be bereft of these kinds of attributes that you don’t get when you graduate with a diploma or a degree from a college."

Just last month, the Ministry of Education announced that the national grade point average had moved from a D to D+. While the move was considered to be an improvement for ministry of education officials, many Bahamians who were still unsatisfied that the average had only moved by half a point, either blamed teachers or the parent or parents for not giving a 100 percent effort to ensure that students received average passing grades.

By yesterday, Sands explained that the national average is "skewed" because all subjects were not equal and the mean grades for each subject or discipline was different.

On a scale of 1 to 10, Mr. Sands graded the educational system in the Bahamas with a five-and-a-half.

Meanwhile, shifting his focus, Mr. Sands admitted that the educational system was not as responsive as it should be to the needs of children in various communities. He noted, however, that thousands of students who attend government public schools are refusing free meals because of the so-called "embarrassment" and "pride" that is attached to receiving handouts.

"No matter how depressed a child’s home is, there is a certain degree of pride with Bahamian people who say ‘I don’t want you to feed me, I don’t want a handout’. We have children who literally refuse meals because it’s free and they feel that people will look down at them… Bahamians are just proud people."

September 1, 2008

September 1, 2008 | 10:22 PM Comments  0 comments

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