Being so stressed seems to be a norm to Hong Kong people and the situations of we, students who are bearing an unbearable load of expectations, are often put on the spot light. However, in fact, teachers are no exception under the sick, extreme and exam-oriented atmosphere of striving for academic excellence. Shifting our focus ontoteachers, what problems are they facing and how can they be relieved? Read on to understand the stressed-but-receive-no-attention ones.
First off, the workload of teachers is tremendously huge. Not only do they teach and set papers, but they also have to organize different activities for various organizations like the PTA, the CareersCommittee, the Extra-Curricular Activity Committee and so on. Teachers are actually having multi-identities under the simple and plain title of ‘teacher’. The inadequate funds granted by the government make the matter worse. Having insufficient money, schools cannot hire more staffto share the workload, and have no choice but let each of them contribute their time and energy more. This leads to the problem of teachers having too much work to deal with.
Besides the basic job duties, teachers also have to get along with different kinds of people like we, students, and our parents. Teachers are much more than teachers nowadays as they have to take care of both our academic performances and our psychological well-beings, like what our family members do. They spend time being our companions, listening to our plights and hardships, so as to relieve us from misery and agony. However, this turns out to make them feel stressed as they always place us at a high priority.They are always desperate to help us. Moreover, parents can be a source of their pressure as some of the ignorant and self-conceited mums and dads would point their fingers at teachers for letting their children get an undesirable mark. Therefore, people can also be a problem for the teachers who are seemingly working as a public relations officer.
After knowing the predicaments that teachers are suffering, what should the government and we, do to offer a timely helping hand?
To begin with, the government should allocate more resources to the education sector so that more funds can be granted to schools to hire more teachers. With reference to the fiscal budget of this year, it is staggering that the government’s coffer has been overflowing with over $10 billion of revenues. Resources should be abundant enough to be put more on schools to enable them to employ more qualified teachers. Without squeezing the already tight manpower, teachers can be slightly relieved as they need not take charge of so many classes and organizations. They can then have more leisure time to relax. As I remember one teacher saying that she, and her colleagues were wealthy enough to do everything but just that they were not free enough to do anything. Regarding this, better allocation of resources can be a way out.
Besides the government, we, students, also play an important role to ‘free’ our life coaches. Although handing in homework on time, putting efforts intostudying and being attentive in class are just the basic responsibilities of a student, we seldom fulfillthem all. Instead, we slack, we indulge ourselves in different forms of entertainment and we simply ignore them. Just imagine, if you were a benevolent teacher who wasdedicated to nurturing a class with patience and love, how disheartened you would be when you saw your dear students giving up on themselves? Therefore, it is high time we improved ourselves and rectified our misconducts, so that teachers can be less worried about us.
To conclude, teachers are the hidden victims in this ill-conceived education system as they have to swallow an enormous amount of stress as well. In this regard, the government is definitely accountable for taking proper and timely action, and so do we. Receiving so much heartfelt advice and thoughtful guidance from our dear ones, we should now be the one to lend them a helping hand, shouldn’t we?
Carlos, Cheung Chun
2017-18 5C