Teino Evans, Staff Reporter
SOME BASIC school teachers have been taking private lessons in main subjects such as English Language in order to meet matriculation requirements of teachers college, and to defuse criticism that they should not be teaching.
Joy Downer, basic school teacher in the Portmore area, said she was taking English lessons with the hope of improving her overall grasp of the subject.
According to Elizabeth Jennings, who offers private tutoring in GCE English, most of the persons who attended her classes last year were basic school teachers. She noted however that based on their performances, most of them were not at the level that they should be as teachers.
"They had problems with sentence structures, grammar, spelling and subject-verb agreement," Ms. Jennings said.
While she was happy to see these teachers making the effort to get themselves qualified, Mrs. Jennings still expressed concern.
"When you stop to think that these are teachers, you can't help but wonder what it is that they are imparting to students," she said.
Recently, there have been complaints that teachers at early childhood institutions were making serious spelling and grammatical errors when teaching the children.
According to one parent whose child attends a basic school in St. Catherine, she found that some teachers had led children to believe that some pieces of work that they did were correct when in fact they were not.
"Even when words are misspelt, they mark it as correct," she said.
This parent also pointed out that some of these very same teachers have problems with subject-verb agreements.
While accepting that this could be the case, Dr. Madge Linton, assistant chief education officer in the Early Childhood Unit of the Education Ministry, says plans are well on the way to improve the quality of teachers in early childhood institutions.
According to Dr. Linton, "There is a Cabinet submission, now in its advanced stage, which as soon as the policy and standards come into vogue with an Early Childhood Act that we are working on, only persons with minimum four CXC/GCE subjects including English, will be registered in the system. Those who are in the system now and doing well without that type of qualification, will have a five-year period to upgrade themselves," she said.
Also, Dr. Linton says the Ministry is developing a policy that will seek to put at least one college-trained teacher in each of the 1,922 recognised basic schools islandwide.
In terms of more immediate plans, Dr. Linton says there are trainers from the Ministry who are now going out to discover community basic schools, to assist teachers in working out their curriculum and executing proper lessons. In addition, those basic school teachers who have no formal qualifications, are required to attend monthly 'in-service' training put on by the Ministry.
Deloris Smith, senior education officer at the Ministry of Education, says there are currently 5,399 basic school teachers in the system, and only about 200 of them have been college trained.
For those teachers who have the basic requirements, Dr. Linton says, there is the opportunity to get financial assistance, as "the Ministry now has a programme on stream, where teachers with qualifications are given scholarships to do the specialised early childhood programme at teachers colleges and university," she said.
According to Dr. Linton, "Right now there is a lot of emphasis on early childhood to improve the quality so that we can have a better product at the end of the day."
Names withheld by request
