Career as Teacher

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Good policy making cannot be achieved without a good understanding of the realities on the ground, on knowing what is actually achievable

A policy that looks good in theory, but cannot be implemented, is a failure

And there have been too many of such bad policies, where the consequences are very serious, but the policymakers who made them are not held legally accountable

Just to name a few of the more prominent ones

1. Pre-covid, every school carried out annual exercises to ask students if they have computers at home, and have an elearning day. But when covid struck, it exposed the reality that computers at home might be shared by many family members, and exposed that the backend servers cannot support so many users being online at the same time. On paper, this contingency policy looks good, but was actually not implementable in reality.

2. Policy on vaping and smoking related offence. MOE and HPB for years, treated the issue lightly and insisted on using the 'soft approach'. Sending students who were caught vaping for counselling, and not charging anyone in court until the students have clocked a few records. The supplier of these vapes (the sellers, and the people who helped students procure vapes) were not punished. Now the vape situation is out of control. Even primary school kids are vaping like nobody's business.

3. PLD policy. Intention is good, to let children acquire IT skills. But a lot of children lack self discipline. Some even went to bypass the device management settings to allow playing of games. The cases of cyber addiction is becoming more severe, and with many parents working, and who are also unable to enforce discipline at home, a lot of parents have written in to the papers to complain on this issue.

There are a slew of other bad policies. Probably drawn up by people who lack actual school experience.

For Point 1, to be fair, nobody could have predicted the pervasiveness of Covid19 or that elearning would take place at such scale. In terms of continuing education during Covid19, we fared among the best. So in a way, they reacted well given the circumstances.

Agree on Point 2. It was a ticking time bomb and really unfortunate that MOE took soooo long to adopt a firm stand. To me this is a reflection of how much the Senior Management is detached from the ground. Pre-Covid, just ask any neighbour school teachers about vaping, and they know how prevalent it was. Even the JC kids are into it pre 2019.

For Point 3, you need to first understand that the PLD adoption was 'fast-tracked' many years ahead in order to support HBL, hence there'll be inevitable misses. having said that, it has been almost 3 years since the rollout of PLDs, and it is not unreasonable to expect concrete policies and measures to be roll out to tackle the various issues, which they still struggle with.

Based on your 3 examples, i support your primary thesis that the policy makers are detached from the ground and lacks sch experience. However, they do refer to other data sets available and accessible to them. Ideally, teachers' voice should be central in their policy crafting, but i guess there are other 'important' considerations too.

Sometimes, policies are well intentioned but parents do not co-operate

The classic example is the free swimming lessons for P2.

Some parents just falsely declare that their kids can swim to avoid the lessons.

When they go for BMT, then the non-swimmers are discovered.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

There are anti-teacher trolls in this forum and all they do is to bash teachers.

Their remarks are best ignored.

Do not throw pearls to pigs.

Freaking teachers calling those against them as pigs.

What an educated hypocrites.

11 days of public holiday in singapore and the teachers are getting tons of it with few scholl lidays term

What a nice job to have. Good pay. Good leave. Good bonus.

Good life retirement job. Easy.

Teachers are elite of the social class.

They are elegant, educated, respectable and loaded.

Those teachers arrested for crime are exception.

Teachers are the pearls, non-teachers are marble, anti-teachers are boars.

These pigs should be removed from their existences because they are nuisances.

Ignore and belittle those that are in the way.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

There are anti-teacher trolls in this forum and all they do is to bash teachers.

Their remarks are best ignored.

Do not throw pearls to pigs.

cant really fault them. most of them lead difficult and challenging life. putting food on the plate is a privilege that we all take for granted, but not them. so this anonymous forum is the only outlet for them to release stress and feel good about themselves. of course deep down they are aware that they need to work really hard top to get out of the viscious cycle they’ve entered

Are ROs supposed to let their officers know when a C- has been issued to them during ranking?

Originally Posted by Unregistered

30-35 days I mean, excluding weekends

Technically but the 30 to 35 days also including days to set exam papers, clear markings, prep for next term lessons, admins, etc,. Cos, on usual curriculum days, teachers are loaded with lessons, meetings. Cca, you name it.

Hope this clarifies.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Technically but the 30 to 35 days also including days to set exam papers, clear markings, prep for next term lessons, admins, etc,. Cos, on usual curriculum days, teachers are loaded with lessons, meetings. Cca, you name it.

Hope this clarifies.

Every sch has different practice with regard to PVT.

The person asking this qn is unlikely to be asking in good faith. Very possibly a troll who just wants to pin down a big number of “leave” days so they can continue to criticise fellow teachers / the service. These online trolls don’t have context of our continuous work streams/work pieces like national exam duties, IP and non IP planning (eg SOWs), CCA and CCD duties. Hence let’s continue to ignore the trolls.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

For Point 1, to be fair, nobody could have predicted the pervasiveness of Covid19 or that elearning would take place at such scale. In terms of continuing education during Covid19, we fared among the best. So in a way, they reacted well given the circumstances .

For point 1, the COVID pandemic was unexpected.
WFH and eLearning were the best alternatives.
Some fared better than others especially if they had more computing devices available.
Was it a total failure? I think not.
Was it a complete success? Nope, but the majority were fine.

If another pandemic were to recur, similar outcomes would be expected.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Technically but the 30 to 35 days also including days to set exam papers, clear markings, prep for next term lessons, admins, etc,. Cos, on usual curriculum days, teachers are loaded with lessons, meetings. Cca, you name it.

Hope this clarifies.

Not for Jun and esp Dec. Most teachers will switch off entirely in dec and then there's a mad rush on first week of term 1 to do all the prep work that they've putting off.