Are you kidding me?

Taking up a school job is a recent development in my life. Before joining this very well-known school of my city, I was having an impression that knowing my subject well, willingness to make my kids understand the concept and lot of hard work on weak kids would be enough to deliver well in my job. But unexpectedly this job came out to be much more than that. Very first day I experienced work place politics. I was called to the Pricipal’s office and was told that phones are not allowed in classrooms. I was like are you kidding me? Being a maths teacher I can’t afford to miss a single minute. Because a minute means one more sum on the board, clearing one more doubt of a confused student. Yeah so the point is someone went to the principal with the fabricated information. I did use phone but in lunch break. One can’t use phone in their free time is way too conventional in the area of imposing regulations.

After the first very hectic week, we were given deadline to submit the Formative 1 Report card. In this computer era, teachers got to write names, address, birthdates even parents’ occupation on the report card manually. I was like, Are you kidding me?. I said Ok lets do it. Heavy rains and other parallel work messed up with my plan of completing it way too before the deadline and weekend arrived. My coordinator insisted on taking the report cards home and complete them on Sunday. Again I was like, Are you kidding me?  School controls my Saturdays but excuse me I would never in my dreams allow them to control my Sundays. If my course lags I will work any day any number of   hours but Report cards can definitely wait a day.  And then it was my second visit to Principal’s Office, fortunately she was ok with the Idea of submitting the fully filled reports after a day.

This had just not ended and deadlines of submitting registers and lesson plans were announced. This time I was over enthusiastic for completing both the tasks before anyone could imagine. And guess what they told me black pen and whiteners are not allowed in registers. I was like, Are you kidding me? What makes the difference with color of the pen we use in register and why we can’t do any mistakes? Unless you get the required information from the registers, why black pens and whiteners should matter. Rot in hell... those education inspectors who check calibre of a teacher by looking at the presentation in most useless document- register.

This episode of register conditioning had already driven me crazy and then comes the instruction of a co-ordinator that teachers got to manually copy the syllabus in the log book ditto from the print outs. One more time, I was like... Are you kidding me. Why to waste time in copying same information when you can stick the print outs. I chose the simple way of sticking the printouts. Now waiting for my call from the Principal’s office.

Teachers are not clerks.. Our Education system has to first start acknowledging teachers for their teaching abilities to change the present scenario.