“You cannot be a teacher, you cannot be an educator and you see people as no good, misfit and dunces,” said a passionate Chief Education Officer (CEO) at the opening ceremony for a three-day workshop, which will focus on the new curriculum at Regency Hotel, Georgetown on Wednesday.
The CEO, Marcel Hutson, said he believed that too many teachers these days adopted the posture of being judgmental and tended to say things to children that could lower their self-esteem and affect their learning ability for good.
According to him, teachers should be more considerate of their students and develop lesson plans, along with other teaching resources that will benefit all of
Chief Education Officer Marcel Hutson
their students, regardless how of fast or slow they may learn.
“It has to do with the methodologies, the strategies and all of that, and I hope that even as we write we would consider these methodologies and strategies and so we have to move away from abstract teaching and teaching that is done in a vacuum and, therefore , our children are not learning,” he said.
Hutson added that teachers too must be in love with their jobs as otherwise the drive to see children succeed would not be there, resulting in children not being encouraged to excel in their studies. It was on this note that the CEO shared details on his recent visit to Jamaica, where he learnt that in Finland and Singapore, persons are not given the position of a teacher merely because of their educational achievements. In fact, he said that interested persons there are screened to see whether or not the individual’s attitude, personality, and character are fit for the job.
He explained that he personally heard educators calling their students “dunce” among other hurtful things and reminded teachers that “we have to be facilitators and the creators of learning”. It was because of the hurtful things that are said to students, even at the tertiary level, persons could be scared away from pursuing their studies, he said.
“One person said to me, and I say this without any apology, it was a person who completed a doctoral degree, said I did not go to UWI (University of the West Indies) because I did not want people to fatigue me … I have done a masters with people at Nova University in the United States and in conjunction with the University of Guyana (UG) and I could tell you that there was a difference in the approach of the two groups’,” he related.
According to the CEO, the lecturers at the US university were “creators and facilitators of learning”. While not saying much about the local University, he just pointed out that “if a person enters an institution and the first thing is that somebody will greet you and say “you see you with that attitude you will never graduate from here”, right away the spirit is broken”.
