SINGAPORE — Every week, Sandra (not her real name) lugs a small-sized suitcase from her workplace back home. She’s neither a flight attendant nor a fashion designer — but a teacher bringing back her students’ papers for the weekend.
arguing and threatening his teacher with violence. The video first surfaced on Aug 23.
It also has put in place measures to support staff well-being, such as in-house professional counselling services and a"whole-of-government 24/7 counselling hotline" for public officers. It added: "Parents and the public can also work closely with teachers to establish positive partnerships and set appropriate expectations on the teachers’ responsibilities for our children’s development."For Mandy, the work continues long after official school hours, with her phone notifications constantly going off, as students and parents send messages into the wee hours of the night.
“Blended learning poses challenges on multiple fronts. It requires more and in-depth preparation and post-lesson monitoring, in addition to requiring new pedagogical approaches,” said Mr Thiruman. A secondary school teacher, who wanted to be known only as Germaine, has been teaching for almost four decades. She lamented how"discipline has dropped tremendously in school" over the years."It was much easier to discipline the kids in the earlier years," she said.“For the male students, will say they’ll only wake up during their National Service because they won’t listen to any of us. And their parents don’t have as much of a say there as compared to ,” she said.
He added that the rise of social media use and its growing influence on children — especially in families where parents do not spend enough quality time with their children — has also compounded the situation, with children picking up bad behaviour they see online. The ministry added that as part of the teacher preparation courses at the National Institute of Education , teachers are trained in classroom management, including equipping them to manage students who show"disruptive behaviour".
A former English and English Literature junior college teacher, who wished to be known as Ms V Loh, recalled how parents would treat her like a “surrogate parent”, asking questions about their children’s private lives. “Teaching has changed so much since I started in 1996, but mainly because of parents. When MOE started placing more emphasis on parent engagements, we had to deal with some who may carry their own emotional baggage that can stress us out,” she said.
Nevertheless, Ms Loh, the former teacher, noted that parents these days have higher expectations of teachers and are more interested in what their children learn in school because they themselves are more educated, compared with parents in the past. And this was something that she, as a mother herself, can understand, she said.
Likening teachers to service staff, Sandra said: “Parents are like our customers. If we don’t make them happy, they’ll complain until we have no choice but to do it.” Germaine, the secondary school teacher, said that when a school receives a complaint, an investigation has to be initiated, despite the possibility that the claim is untrue or inaccurate.
Sandra added: “Sometimes, even if the school management does try to explain to parents why some action can’t be taken, parents will complain to and we have no choice but to conform.”Ms Loh, the former JC teacher, said her students’ phones had made her feel like she was always under surveillance when teaching.
Contract adjunct teaching allows MOE teachers to take on just part of a teacher’s workload, with a salary pro-rated based on the work they take up. In 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, they had the added job of contact tracing, ensuring students turn up for online classes, and trying their best to engage them despite being behind a screen.
While policies differ among schools as Covid-19 becomes endemic, some will switch classes to home-based learning when more than five students get infected — hence the SLS platform and years of practice have helped make the switch easier. It added:"Schools have flexibility to pace the implementation of selected initiatives, including deferring implementation if this helps to manage staff workload."
The use of technology is also encouraged to streamline administrative processes, the ministry said. For example, teachers can now monitor and track students' attendance using mobile phones, or collect consent forms and disseminate information to parents via Parents' Gateway, a mobile application. On the benefits of having smaller classrooms, Mr Ng added: “When one or two students don’t understand a topic, I can just pause the class and focus on this topic, and not need to leave behind other kids to keep the entire class engaged. With fewer students, they are also easy to connect with.”
This is also used by the rest of the Civil Service and allows them to"recognise the good work that have done", said MOE. "MOE regularly updates and engages all school leaders on key human resource policies and issues which include performance management policies, good practices and expected standards of performance assessment," the ministry added.
“In the 1990s, parents would not contact us unless there was an urgent matter… It was a respectable job to be a teacher,” she said.Sandra, the mother tongue teacher, hopes that she can be allowed to focus on teaching. He said that the union collects feedback from teachers regularly through dialogues, surveys and focus group discussions. It also receives daily emails and phone calls from teachers hoping to see improvements to their working conditions.“To then load them with committee work, non-teaching related duties and meetings as well as constant, non-stop WhatsApp messages from multiple chat groups is unwise and untenable,” he stressed.
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