Lessons have negative impact on children

Mar 02, 2013 News

– Chief Education Officer

Chief Education Officer, Olato Sam, has stated that extra lessons are having a negative impact on students, especially those preparing for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate examinations.
Mr. Sam was speaking to parents on the Corentyne recently during a fan-out visit and interaction in the Berbice area. Several issues were raised by the parents at the Corentyne Comprehensive High School and JC Chandisingh Secondary School. One issue was the poor examination results.
Extra lessons, he stated, are now becoming a deterrent to students progressing rather “than something contributing to their success”. Sam cited Maths.
“Most of our students writing CSEC Maths attend extra lessons, but…because they are going to extra lessons; they are not paying attention in school”.
Investigations, he said, have revealed that students are not paying attention in school and not even attending classes”. He added, too, that what is happening is that students find it confusing to “pay attention to two people” (the school teacher and extra lessons teacher) and thus, they “tune one person [the teacher in school] out and they are following the other person.
“Nine times out of ten, they (the students) prefer to follow the person mommy or daddy is paying, and they do that to their detriment”, he added,
Sam stated that he does not have problems with lessons but the activity is supposed to support the school curriculum, “to give the students the opportunity to master the concepts they are learning in schools.
“However, you parents are spending your hard-earned money but the lessons teachers are teaching things that are not aligned with the things being taught in school, so the students are becoming more confused than anything else”
He cautioned parents to have a conversation with their children’s lessons teacher, to find out what the children are doing in school and work along with the lessons teacher. “That’s when the lessons will be making sense in the system and helping our children. The way it’s going on right now, it’s not working,” he said.
The official stated that some schools have teachers giving voluntary service in the form of extra lessons to students in the afternoons and that the Ministry of Education is even working with some Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs) to “compensate” those teachers, through anonymous contributions of parents.
Sam said that lessons teachers have students from different schools “and they are doing their own thing. It’s time they streamline this and do it in a way that we are getting value for money”.
He urged lessons teachers to teach the same curriculum that the public schools use, “so you know where generally the children should be at any time in the [school] year in Mathematics and English”.
He bemoaned the need for cluster sessions for students preparing to write the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) Exams to boost results in Guyana.
The cluster sessions will begin very soon and will run into the Easter holidays in Berbice. But Sam was concerned about the trend of teachers making sacrifices to meet with students who hardly turn up for these sessions.
“We’ve organized these things in the past—the teachers come and make themselves available and the students don’t show up…three and four students show up. It seems to us that when our teachers are making themselves available to us to give free instruction, our students don’t want that and poor parents are not supporting that. When they have to pay outside there, they go”.
He stated that the remedial sessions would happen during the school day, “because we cannot get the students to show up in the afternoons or weekends, and these reviews are for the current CSEC students.”

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Lessons have negative impact on children

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