Dear Editor,
In his Jamaica Observer column of November 2, 2012, Dr Franklin Johnston wrote a diatribe about the characteristics of a teflon teacher.
He wrote: "Teachers take the praise and avoid all blame 'Teflon Teacher'. It is the only avocation where the paying customer gets the blame and keeps quiet... If teaching was JPS, schools would not survive the onslaught."
I am surprised that the senior adviser to the minister of education, who gets $5 million plus other perks, an amount roughly five times the salary of a trained graduate, would seek to lump all schools and teachers in a single bag to lambaste them.
Did the minister of education, Ronald Thwaites, employ him to demotivate the teachers of Jamaica? I would love to examine your job description, Dr Johnston.
Your diatribe, Dr Johnston, goes on to compare teachers with doctors and shows up the teachers as non-performers. You should know that if the cemeteries of Jamaica could talk, they would speak out loudly about errors that sent some of them there.
Your input seems only to demotivate the teachers who are under stress and strain — the effect mostly of letters written by individuals like you who know nothing about the system. As also the imposition by your ministry of extra-codal activities, which bear no relationship to effective teaching such as fundraising to provide equipment and to building classrooms that your ministry will not provide. Other factors that militate against effective teaching are a class size of 50, not experienced by the poorest nations in the world, and a shift system by which students are taught only 4 1/2 hours per day and which the ministry of education will not deal with in any urgent fashion.
Rather than blaming the teachers for everything wrong under the sun, let your ministry, where you are senior adviser and well paid from the coffers of this country, fix the wrongs and create the atmosphere where the teachers of Jamaica can practise their profession with dignity and panache.
It is not too late for the minister to ask you to withdraw this article, castigate you and ask you to apologise to the teachers of Jamaica.
Your outstanding former teacher and principal, Edith Dalton James, who fought for teachers' rights, and who was three times President of the Jamaica Union of Teachers, may now be "turning in her grave".
Dr Johnston, I submit, cannot be the right person to advise the minister of education. The unbridled knight would like to charge him with his sharp sword in hand, and remove all the benefits that the hard-working teachers of Jamaica have won over the years, especially under the People's National Party government.
We have to rein him in now, or else the "Bull in the China Shop" will cause irreparable damage to the education system.
Dundee Hewitt,
Mandeville, Manchester
hewittdundee@hotmail.com
Diatribe, Doctor Johnston, diatribe
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In his Jamaica Observer column of November 2, 2012, Dr Franklin Johnston wrote a diatribe about the characteristics of a teflon teacher.
He wrote: "Teachers take the praise and avoid all blame 'Teflon Teacher'. It is the only avocation where the paying customer gets the blame and keeps quiet... If teaching was JPS, schools would not survive the onslaught."
I am surprised that the senior adviser to the minister of education, who gets $5 million plus other perks, an amount roughly five times the salary of a trained graduate, would seek to lump all schools and teachers in a single bag to lambaste them.
Did the minister of education, Ronald Thwaites, employ him to demotivate the teachers of Jamaica? I would love to examine your job description, Dr Johnston.
Your diatribe, Dr Johnston, goes on to compare teachers with doctors and shows up the teachers as non-performers. You should know that if the cemeteries of Jamaica could talk, they would speak out loudly about errors that sent some of them there.
Your input seems only to demotivate the teachers who are under stress and strain — the effect mostly of letters written by individuals like you who know nothing about the system. As also the imposition by your ministry of extra-codal activities, which bear no relationship to effective teaching such as fundraising to provide equipment and to building classrooms that your ministry will not provide. Other factors that militate against effective teaching are a class size of 50, not experienced by the poorest nations in the world, and a shift system by which students are taught only 4 1/2 hours per day and which the ministry of education will not deal with in any urgent fashion.
Rather than blaming the teachers for everything wrong under the sun, let your ministry, where you are senior adviser and well paid from the coffers of this country, fix the wrongs and create the atmosphere where the teachers of Jamaica can practise their profession with dignity and panache.
It is not too late for the minister to ask you to withdraw this article, castigate you and ask you to apologise to the teachers of Jamaica.
Your outstanding former teacher and principal, Edith Dalton James, who fought for teachers' rights, and who was three times President of the Jamaica Union of Teachers, may now be "turning in her grave".
Dr Johnston, I submit, cannot be the right person to advise the minister of education. The unbridled knight would like to charge him with his sharp sword in hand, and remove all the benefits that the hard-working teachers of Jamaica have won over the years, especially under the People's National Party government.
We have to rein him in now, or else the "Bull in the China Shop" will cause irreparable damage to the education system.
Dundee Hewitt,
Mandeville, Manchester
hewittdundee@hotmail.com
Diatribe, Doctor Johnston, diatribe
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