By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
According to an elementary school teacher I talked to recently, the DepEd’s mistakes are not the only culprits for the alarming degeneration of the standard of basic education in the country saying that the change in the behavior and attitudes of learners these days could even be the more telling factor.
Their attitude is different. Very difficult to guide and control. While before a simple “Keep quiet” would suffice to stop the racket in the classroom, many pupils act as though they heard nothing even when the command is repeated. Thus declared the teacher.
She said that while before the moment children would see her coming, they would try to outrun each other to come relieve her of her things, now she has to call them seeing to it that she names the child because without them hearing their names, they would not respond. There are even some who pretend they have not seen her coming.
The hands of teachers are tied by the laws protecting children with teacher very wary because pupils have cellphones and could record what they believe as violations of their rights taking place in the classroom. With no similar protection for teachers, the overall effect is that many pupils do just what they please. She commented that when children are unruly at home parents could not avoid going physical so imagine the situation in the school where there are a lot of them with the same aversion to order and control and the teacher cannot apply the good old practices of reining in children. And in the locality, according to the teacher, there are classes with 40 pupils upwards. She said that to give teachers a fighting chance in the current context, the ratio of teacher to pupils should be lowered.
Regarding curriculum which many people blame for the deterioration of the educational system, the teacher expressed puzzlement why the DepEd replaced the simple curriculum when it was working well. She opined that once a child learns to read and write, understands what he reads and can do Math, they are already stable because the foundation of their educational development has already been firmly laid. They will no longer be lost and most of all, they are ready to handle their next lessons. She said that with the additional subjects in the lower grades imposed by the new curriculum, the learning process has been considerably slowed down as the pupils no longer know which to do first unlike before when they can focus because of the few subjects.
If she had her way, she would like the DepEd to just revert to the 3Rs saying that this would not only benefit the learners but the teachers as well who are now groaning under the heavy weight of the new curriculum.
The teacher said that one of the very clear pieces of evidence of the downtrend in our educational standards is the terrible handwriting of students these days, that unlike older people who follow a prescribed manner of writing the letters of the alphabet, it seems they have freedom to write the letters the way they wish to write them. Very interesting and could be a subject of an investigative report because if true, it is no longer just the ability of the DepEd to teach children to read that’s slipping.
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