Increasing classroom time

Mar 06, 2024 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – With the teachers strike off, it is time for the Ministry of Education to place on the negotiating table the issue of learning loss as a result of the absence of many teachers from the classroom during the four-week plus strike.

The children, particularly those facing imminent examinations such as the Natural Grade Six Assessment (NGSA), the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations (CAPE), there is much work to be done and this cannot be accommodated in the time available until examinations.

There is a need for extra work to be done and the teachers will be required to put in some extra hours with the students. For this, the Ministry of Education should consider some form of extra-payment for these extra hours.

This column believes that a few simply changes can have a significant impact in education attainment. Fifteen years ago, Barack Obama had the vision to appreciate the importance of small changes in the delivery of education.

He had indicated then that he would have liked to see children spend more time in schools. He was also keen on longer school days, educators making school buildings more accessible to our children during weekends so that they can have a safe place to go and study and interact with their school peers.

In Guyana, most schools are inaccessible to children on weekends. Social organizations who host events in schools have greater access to use of the buildings than children who may wish to go there to study or participate in some recreational or sporting activity.

One of the problems that is to be found in many poor homes in Guyana, is the lack of a comfortable space for many children to study at nights. Not many homes have a separate study room where the children can go at nights and spend some quality time. Poor people hardly have space to walk in their cramped homes much less to have the space or the resources for desk and bookshelf.

The environment in which kids study is important. If you have a quiet, comfortable room, that locks out the distractions, then your kids will be able to do more in one hour than the average kids without this environment will do in six or seven hours.

Thus, it is important that children have somewhere suitable to study not just in the run up to examinations but throughout their school life. In poor communities, particularly in rural areas, the organization of nightly supervised study groups within schools or within social organizations can make a huge difference in the performance of kids.

Another problem that our children are facing is insufficient classroom hours. There are just too many distractions within the school environment: school sports, examinations, graduation, non academic events, attending public rallies etc.
The school year is already abbreviated because of a two months August holiday, a two- week Easter and a three week Christmas vacation. When coupled with the large number of public holidays in Guyana, it means that our children are being seriously short-changed within the system when it comes to teaching hours.

While there is likely to be mass protest and disruptions, if serious thought is given to reducing the school holidays, at least the education authorities can insist that students write their examinations only during the last two weeks of the school year and that teachers use the vacation period, for which they are paid in any event, to mark and grade these examinations.

Since examinations usually last two weeks in most schools and since report cards have to be ready for the end of term, it means that no work is usually done during the last week of school. Hardly any work is also done in many schools during the first week.
This means that in a thirty-six-week school year, some six weeks of teaching is lost. Multiply this over a period of 13 years and it amounts over the course of a child’s schooling more than two school years being lost due to the limited teaching taking place in the opening and final week of school each term.

Consider if a child had two more years in school what a difference that would make to that child’s performance and this is why Obama’s suggestion about more time being spent in school was such an incisive recommendation. In our case, we do not necessarily need to extend the school day but simply to ensure that full use is made during the first and final week of school.

If on top of these two years lost, we can reduce the Easter and Christmas holidays by a week each, it means we are adding another half of a year to our child’s education; and if instead of commencing most classes at 9. am each day we add one more hour of classes in the mornings it means that every week we will be adding one day more of classes to the time spent in school, which translates to thirty- six more days per school year of about five weeks, multiplied by thirteen years and we are effectively adding close to another two years to classroom time.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations (CAPE), Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC), Ministry of Education, Natural Grade Six Assessment (NGSA), strike

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