What fancy training are you talking about?

Feb 27, 2016 Letters

Dear Editor,
Having read the letter headed “Guyanese teachers need to be more qualified”, I am left wondering how is it that the pupils/students of my 1930s/40s generation and for several years afterwards, as adults and workers, were known abroad as educated and therefore very useful to employers? And our teachers did not have any ‘fancy training’?
I think success in the teaching profession requires a sense of vocation, the ability to communicate, to impart knowledge, and a love of children. I am not sure what “teacher quality” is, apart from this, and I would hesitate to support the view of “doing what you are being paid for six hours a day”. To me, that suggests ‘clock watching’.
I often get the impression that, not unlike other professions in the American system, which seems keen on extracting as much money as possible from students, courses and qualifications are required for every step upwards on the examination ladder. Many of the young students I knew in the 1950s/60s had to partly fund their studies by working in restaurants, no doubt run by friends of the college people. In any case, it is not fair to compare poor Guyana with sophisticated America. Let us “look at the doughnut, not at the hole”.
It seems to me gaining qualifications over and above those strictly required for the job demonstrates that one is serious about one’s job and capable of advancing as time goes by, and does not need undue pressure. Instead, let us observe the techniques of those who have been successful over years of practice and try to learn from them, to improve our own techniques, eventually becoming just as successful.
If we wish to work outside Guyana, then that is a different matter.
Geralda Dennison

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