Letters
Ugandan teachers need serious training
Ugandan teachers need serious training
Is it because of our poor education system that we still have products of teachers who believe that caning a pupil will make her pass her exams or is it simply that these teachers are just not well trained?
It’s not like every time a pupil fails a test or an exam, a child learns more slowly than other children of the same age.
Children with this disability according to experts are known to have limitations in thinking skills, including the ability to reason and memorize. Apart from also having difficulties with paying attention and organizing information, they also have trouble seeing how things and events relate with each other.
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is another case that can affect a child’s learning. ASD is a complex disorder that affects the brain’s normal development. Children with ASD tend to have a repetitive behavior that normally distracts them from other things. They also have narrow interests for example may just want to play and put their full concentration on only that. Besides that, they also have difficulties with social communication and interaction etc.
With the above cases and others that I have left out commonly caused by premature birth, a child can have a big challenge when it comes to learning. But because our teachers here are ignorant and not observant, many times they fail to notice that there is a problem and when they discover one, instead of speaking with a child’s parents, they take it onto themselves to solve the problem through using wrong methods. Sometimes you can’t blame them because they don’t know what the exact problem is and instead relate it with either laziness or naughtiness.
In order to avoid such instances, I highly urge the ministry of education to train teachers on such cases. If such cases are included on their syllabus, it can go a long way to enhance their knowledge and also enable them to know how to handle children with such cases.
On the other hand, given the saying, ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’, I will advise schools to leave the caning of students for only disciplinary cases. However, they can also rely on other punishments that are not capital in nature but will still achieve the same objective. For example grounding a child in a classroom for reasonable hours after classes, making them do general cleaning etc.
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