Missing notebooks and lousy teacher November 15, 2005
It’s exam week and my son Dylan will be going to his tests unprepared. Unfortunately for him, his teacher only informed them yesterday that she will be holding the second periodical exams from Wednesday to Friday. She has not given her class pointers, has not taken time to review them, or made any effort whatsoever to prepare her pupils.
She is the typical Philippine public school teacher. No, change that. She is worse than the typical public school teacher. And all this because her husband is giving her a hard time. Why not leave him for heaven’s sake. To think her daughter is also in the class. I can understand not caring if other people’s children won’t learn anything but her own kid? That seems to me selfishness at its greatest.
I guess I can’t do anything but grumble. Even with my litany of complaints against her, I cannot risk a confrontation because she might take it out on my son. Since the school incorporates the grade on a child’s character with a major subject, it would be easy for her to say my son misbehaves in school. He’s the most behaved of the lot, though, and I am not only saying this because I’m his mother.
What makes it worse in my son’s case is that his teacher only returned his notebooks today. At the beginning of term, she made it clear to us that her pupils must submit their notebooks everyday so she could check if they did their class work. That is exactly what my son did. What happens? She just leaves the notebooks on her table and they stay there until she deems it time to check them. The result: missing notebooks. My son’s classmates have pointed to the janitor, a relative of the principal, as the culprit.
It was Dylan’s insistence on submitting his work every end of class that cost my son his new Filipino notebook and possibly his Quiz notebook. I can understand the reason behind the loss of my son’s Filipino notebook, it was new (he has written on only four pages, I think) and of the expensive kind, but the Quiz notebook had been used since the start of first grade and the pages were already sort of crumpled.
I’ve instructed my son not to anymore leave his notebook in school. He should pass it once he finishes with his seatwork but must get it back by end of class even if his teacher has not checked it. I intend to go through his notes once I get home from work and check whatever needs to be checked.
My son’s school shares space with the Lapu-Lapu City Schools Division Office. So it should be easy for education officials of that city to monitor the school’s teachers but I guess they’ve not been doing this. It’s either they are too busy (what could be more important for education officials than improving the quality of education) or they sanction her incompetence.
Obviously its your darling son who is the innocent party, and others are always at fault. Is this the kind of values you impart at home.
Teach your son to be responsible. Its common sense not to leave important stuff on anyone’s table. They are ‘begging’ to be misplaced, ie stolen.
Stop blaming others for all ills in your life. Or else you son will only grow up shifting blame to eveyone else except himself.
yanda,
please don’t be too hard on my son, he is only 7 years old. if his teacher, who is obviously much, much older, could not be responsible enough to return his notebooks after requiring him to submit them for checking everytime there is seatwork, i obviously could not fault him for not knowing any better.
i can assure you, however, that we have learned our lesson after losing two notebooks. he now gets back his notebooks, checked or not checked, at every end of class.
knowing only recently that other people have access to that classroom when the teacher or the students are not there anymore, i’m sure we could be forgiven for being stupid.
if my son were hopelessly irresponsible, he’d have lost all his notebooks by now. but as it is, we only lost two and they could be easily replaced.
if it took me my whole 30+ years to know the meaning of responsibility, i’m willing to give my son some more time to grow up and learn how it is to be responsible.
obviously you have not read this part of the post, though.
also, just so we are clear on this, i am certainly not blaming the teacher for all ills in my life, only for my son’s missing notebooks.
it scares me though that you have more understanding for the teacher’s failures than for my son’s.