Over the years re­ports on teach­ers not show­ing up to teach or show­ing up but stay­ing in the staff room are be­com­ing more com­mon. This phe­nom­e­non of ab­sen­tee teach­ers has be­come in­creas­ing­ly wide­spread. I read an ar­ti­cle on Feb­ru­ary 23 in which Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Tim Gopeesingh and the TTUTA Vice Pres­i­dent got in­to a con­fronta­tion over teacher ab­sen­teeism at Cunu­pia Sec­ondary.

While it was un­for­tu­nate, Mr Gopeesingh is on­ly now recog­nis­ing the run­away horse that is called TTUTA and their mem­ber­ship. How­ev­er, Cunu­pia Sec­ondary is one school and there are hun­dreds in both the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary school sys­tems with teach­ers ei­ther not show­ing up or show­ing up but hav­ing the ail­ment of staff roomi­tis.

Teach­ing is chal­leng­ing, but if a teacher does not like the school in which they teach, the stu­dents and/or their par­ents, you re­al­ly should re­sign from your school im­me­di­ate­ly and stop "eat­ing ah food" for do­ing noth­ing.

I chal­lenge the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion to pub­lish re­ports on the worst per­form­ing pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools, and show where teacher ab­sen­teeism plays a fac­tor. Maybe the hi­er­ar­chy in TTUTA can ex­plain to the pop­u­la­tion how a child in T&T in 2013 can go through his/her en­tire pri­ma­ry school ed­u­ca­tion and still not be able to read and write.

How then can any­one ex­pect this child to per­form at sec­ondary school? TTUTA and its mem­bers are so quick to lay blame for un­der­per­for­mance at the feet of the chil­dren them­selves, bad par­ent­ing and the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion. Nev­er have I heard teach­ers blam­ing them­selves for poor per­form­ing stu­dents.

By the way Mr Gopeesingh, while your Gov­ern­ment is de­vel­op­ing ideas for crime fight­ing, may I sug­gest as a crime fight­ing ini­tia­tive you pass leg­is­la­tion to end the tenure of teach­ers in or­der to be able to fire the ab­sen­tee ones. Change is dif­fi­cult; some­times rev­o­lu­tions are need­ed, some­times you need to be un­pop­u­lar to make a dif­fer­ence. The 600 teach­ers your min­istry wants to hire–I im­plore you to put sys­tems in place to make sure they are not the "eat ah food for noth­ing" types or else noth­ing will change.

Kel­li Coombs

Mar­aval