Last week, self-professed grassroots leader Lee Wei Yin’s Straits Times forum letter, “Working after school hours part of ‘service’” got many teachers upset with her comments.
Her letter was in response to another ST letter asking the Ministry of Education to regulate work hours for teachers so that the autonomy given to school principals to dictate working hours would be reduced. She disagreed with this saying it was not realistic.
Lee had written that “the school is providing a service, with its customers being primarily the students who are minors, and the parents… Parents pick schools with the “best service” to maximise the potential of their children.”
Well, it turns out, everyone was wrong, and Lee was always on the side of the teachers.
Plot Twist
In the new piece, published on Oct. 13, she made three key corrections.
1. The point of her initial letter was to shine the light on parent’s attitude towards teachers.
What I meant was that the extra working hours teachers put in are driven by competitive parents who expect schools, and hence teachers, to serve and go beyond their duties to maximise students’ potential.
Yeah, those parents with their emphasis on extra curricular activities. Grrr.
This scathing look at the unhealthy desire to go beyond was sadly slightly different in her first piece.
This will involve students and teachers putting in extra effort to prepare or rehearse after school. This will benefit students, giving them better CCA grading and outside-the-classroom learning experiences.
Strange.
2. Service is not a bad thing
A point of contention many had with her article was the conflation of teachers as service providers.
This, she claims, was never supposed to be derogatory.
I view “service”, especially in teaching, as no less respected and no less important in our society. I certainly did not mean to cause distress to the very people I was trying to defend.
Lee was trying to defend teachers all along.
3. Lee’s letter was focused on low income families
Lee talked about how her interactions (perhaps through her activities as a grassroot leader, a position she didn’t mention this time for some reason) exposed her to the conditions of the less wealthy.
Through my interaction with a number of low-income parents in neighbourhood schools, I have found that they are unwilling to take leave to attend school activities due to the nature of their work.
For them, feeding the family is more important than education. Taking time off from work would mean no income or less income.
Though they may not be the majority, they should not be ignored.
Which is an excellent point, the lower income families do have a harder time staying involved with their children’s curricular activities, for financial reasons.
However, this is a slight departure from how she painted the plight of parents in her first article.
Parents pick schools with the “best service” to maximise the potential of their children. They have a strong preference for schools with the best results in major exams and strong showing at co-curricular activity (CCA) competitions, which means extra class time and training to boost results.
Most parents have full-time jobs and are not able to attend meet-the-parents sessions or student performances during normal school hours. Therefore, it is not realistic to have such sessions during weekday school hours.
This seems to address parental problems through the lens of academia, instead of financial restraints.
Which is like saying you are addressing poverty by writing an article on the unacceptable increase in the price of caviar.
Ending
After highlighting her own method of raising her children,
To counter this mindset, I give my own children the option of attending their teachers’ guided revision sessions in school or being coached by me at home.
… she ended off her letter with this.
All stakeholders have to come together to find workable solutions to help teachers better manage their working hours.
She ended off her first letter like this.
If the Education Ministry can train more teachers to replace those who resign, why not use the same effort to cut class size and share the work load?
Subtle.
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