Indonesian teachers lose steam on professionalism

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): "Ma'am, why didn't you check my homework?" asked a school boy. The math teacher curtly replied, "What for? I know your mom did it."

The boy used to be top of his class, excelling in math and science and would have been simply too proud to have somebody else do his homework for him. The teacher's response thus had a devastating impact on his pride and his grades have been sliding downward ever since. This boy is my daughter's classmate.

Some teachers at our schools today are killing the children's natural drive to learn. As a father of a fifth-grader, I have often been shocked by their behavior which does irreversible damage to her enthusiasm towards school.

Take her Indonesian language teacher, for example. She once told her class to learn a lengthy poem by heart to recite it before the class. Our daughter spent the whole night rehearsing with us, and we stayed up late with her, giving her our criticism and encouragement only to be told the next day that the teacher did not mention the recital at all.

Many teachers give their students tough assignments but often do not follow up on them. Once in a while, however, they surprise their students by asking for the assignment, and those who happen to have skipped it get punished harshly. Is there any more effective way to destroy the students' positive image of school?

What my daughter and her classmate went through is not uncommon in our schools nowadays. These are daily horror stories, particularly in the big cities.

To make matters worse, most wealthy parents opt for the shortcut: Just give the teachers what they want so that they will give their children special attention -- and special treatment. Such generosity then makes teachers as inconsistent with grades as they are with assignments. As a result, our children begin to be subjected to unfair treatment in elementary school. Parents who cannot afford to compete with the wealthy have to keep their mouth shut for fear that their children will later suffer their teachers' retaliation.

Is it really hard to be a true teacher, a teacher that makes a difference in the life of their students? I don't think so. We do not need to be experts, but as parents we know some basic things that we want our children's teachers to do:

Communicate

Teaching is basically letting the students know what they don't know yet. In a word -- communicating. Communicating is by no means an easy task, but it is not a difficult one, either. It is a skill that can be developed if teachers are willing to explore new ways and techniques as they go along. Unfortunately, nowadays we rarely meet teachers who really try to communicate with their students. Most seem to think that their job is limited to dictating notes, giving assignments, collecting money for photocopying, handing out test papers, and giving grades.

We often hear students complain about teachers who speak so softly in the classroom that even the pupils sitting in the front rows can hardly hear what they say. Are these teachers really communicating? With more than forty students packed into the classroom, it should be obvious that teachers must always speak in a loud voice. Alas, our teachers have to preserve their voices and energy because they have a series of private lessons to give in the afternoon. It is thus understandable that they prefer to remain seated at their desk, relax and speak as if to themselves while the students struggle to remain awake.

Real communication requires feedback. Tests are actually the best means for getting this feedback since they indicate two things: First, they tell the teachers how well individual students have understood the material. Second, they also show how effective they themselves have been. When the majority fails, instead of shrugging it off by saying "How come this year's students are so dumb?", the teachers should realize that they have failed in communicating properly.

A true teacher communicates. Not only does their job comprise mostly of communicating knowledge and helping the students master it, they should also exude enthusiasm. How can they do this if the students cannot even hear what they say?

Exercise judgment

Our school curricula are sad jokes and the textbooks are tragi-comedies. To add to the suffering of our students, so many of our teachers are preoccupied with their private lessons and part-time jobs after class that they have no time or energy left to sit down and think through their course materials for the next day. The result? They just follow the curricula and textbooks blindly and faithfully.

What we need is teachers who devote enough time choosing only the important and the relevant out of the deplorable curricula and textbooks. My daughter once told us that her teacher discussed in the class all the steps in using an elevator. He told them, among other things, what the "Close" button was for. Now, even though the curriculum may have contained this discussion topic, could he not have used his common sense and skipped it?

It has often been said that the latest revision of our curricula leaves a lot up to the teachers, allowing them to use their own creativity. The same teacher who spent the entire class session on how to use the elevator also gave her class a bizarre assignment one day: Everybody had to write down the steps in using a handphone. While this handphone assignment could be viewed as the product of his creativity, it was not the product of sound judgment. Apart from that, it was crassly insensitive to students from poorer families, who may not even have a regular telephone in their homes.

Teachers could use their judgment. They are in a position to distinguish what is appropriate, what is not, what is useful and what is clearly rubbish. They could choose to teach only the former and skip the latter.

Respect the students

My daughter once did very well in her math exercises at school. She answered every answer correctly. Yet her teacher crossed out her work in thick red ink because she had left her textbook at home. Obviously, when the students make mistakes, they should be punished and the punishment is often disproportionate to the mistakes. On the other hand, when the teachers do not come to school without any clear excuse or even any news, it is considered their prerogative. When they fail to hand back graded test papers that the students need to prepare for the next exams, they do not feel guilty.

This teacher-can't-be-wrong attitude is typical in our school system. It shows how little respect our teachers have for their students. My hunch is that the increasingly violent students brawls that we have been witnessing in Jakarta in the past few years are just their reaction to the constant disrespect they have to endure at their school.

Grading assignments and handing them back in time to the students is one way the teachers can show respect for them. Giving them objective grades is another. Appreciating their efforts is another form of respect that is painfully missing in our schools today.

Respect is a two-way street. When teachers fail to respect the students, how can our youngsters have a positive image of their school?

Know what it means to be a teacher

A teacher has never been a profession for those who seek riches. No one has ever become just by teaching. Sometimes there is not even any appreciation from those whom they have taught, either, as a close friend of mine would readily testify. He was on various thesis committees for many years, and once told me that he had long stopped being surprised how many of his students no longer remember him only a few months after they had come to him for consultation.

At a conversation I had with the guidance and counseling lady from a popular private school in West Jakarta recently, I learned that most of the students who had to repeat class at that school mostly belonged to middle- and low-income groups. What does this tell us? Does it mean that the well-to-do pupils get better attention from their parents at home? Does it mean that affluent parents generally spend more time helping their children with their studies compared to middle- and low-income parents?

The answer was clear when the lady confided to me how she was shocked to see teachers at her school busily exchange information on the names of students whose parents were rich and generous at the beginning of every new school year.

Certainly it would be totally groundless to accuse every teacher of being responsible for the frightening decline in the quality of our education. We still have a handful of teachers who have high moral values and professional ethics. We do have true teachers who are the source of inspiration to our children. They are, unfortunately, as rare as fresh water in eastern Lombok.

What we wish the large majority of our teachers would realize is that being severely underpaid yet overworked is inherent to the teaching profession. On the other hand, deliberately making the life of their students so hard that parents have no choice but to succumb to their wishes and desires would constitute a betrayal to that profession.

Training will not change the quality of our education at the moment. What our teachers need nowadays is the sense of professional ethics. Only when equipped with high moral values can our teachers make a difference -- to our children and our nation.

Window: What we need is teachers who devote enough time choosing only the important and the relevant out of the deplorable curricula and textbooks.