Have you ever tried to teach several classes for six hours a day for 50 days straight? You will drop to the floor out of sheer exhaustion. Now imagine you have a brutal, cold-hearted employer who then decides to take away a burnout-saving break of 11 days as you are forced to return to put in all your energy to prepare the many children in your charge for the final examination of their young lives, now merely weeks away. It’s the type of mercilessness you’d expect from the Taliban in Afghanistan, which recently told western journalists, with a straight face, that it is about to respect the rights of women and give girls access to education. I am not suggesting the department of basic education (DBE) is like the Taliban, just the straight face bit — that they really care about those under their rule(r).
I am not surprised several of our teacher unions rejected this highly irresponsible decision. The scheduled term runs from July 26 to October 1. There was supposed to be a much-needed break from October 1 to 11, but now another week (October 4 to 8) of teaching has been scheduled. The umpteenth lockdown meant five days of teaching were lost earlier this year and this cancellation of the October break is meant to “make up” for those missed days.
It is a mindless decision on the part of the DBE, coming from bureaucrats in air-conditioned offices who either never taught in real schools or did so decades ago, before there was an overcrowded CAPS curriculum and a teacher’s day was swallowed up by far too much administration. The decision is also based on the dangerous myth that when schools close during lockdown all teachers are on a glorious, unexpected and paid holiday. What nonsense. The teachers I know tried to teach remotely, others caught up with much-needed preparation and not a few threw themselves into catching up with assessments that were piling up because they were making up lost teaching time.
Cram also estimates that by May 2021 about 650,00 to 750,000 children in the seven to 17 age range were not attending school. This is the real danger facing South African education, but what does our witless department do? Mess around with five school days in October.
This is what happens when you treat teachers like machines and not human beings who feel intellectually, emotionally and physically drained because of back-to-back traumas — catch-up teaching and pandemic loss. By this point in the pandemic every teacher knows a colleague who became infected, desperately ill or died from Covid-19. Make no mistake, every day a teacher steps into a crowded classroom they take their lives into their hands. Like the Taliban, only the DBE can wreck an already miserable situation by reducing the one-metre social distancing rule to 0.5m so more children can be crammed into a classroom. The word that comes to mind is witless.
We have much bigger problems to contend with than playing these little permutation games with five days of teaching. The authoritative Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey (Cram) study, titled “The impact of Covid-19 in education”, reported last month that since March last year up to one year of learning might have been lost for children in grades 1 to 9. Cram also estimates that by May 2021 about 650,00 to 750,000 children in the seven to 17 age range were not attending school. This is the real danger facing South African education, but what does our witless department do? Mess around with five school days in October.
As a social scientist I am always intrigued by governmental behaviour in times of crises. Why is the DBE preoccupied with five days when 200 (the approximate teaching days in a normal school calendar year) are lost for hundreds of thousands of children? One reason is the distraction on offer from these “smallanyana skeletons” of a dysfunctional department of education when the large skeletons threaten to overwhelm long-term policy and planning.
The teacher unions fell for that trap, with some of them making peculiar arguments about teachers and planned family holidays being lost. There’s the other problem. For teachers who teach in impoverished communities there are no planned holidays in the budget, only the prospect of some breathing space (literally, in some cases) and respite from the daily grind of in-class teaching.
The DBE should change this decision and give teachers their much-needed and much-anticipated October break for a simple reason. Your ability to teach well under difficult conditions depends on your capacity to refuel for the task ahead. Time off guarantees better results. The last thing we need right now are exhausted teachers in the final stretch leading up to finals in November/December. We cannot change the mind of the Taliban. Here’s the DBE’s chance to prove it is different.
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