Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Fighting the monsters

Friedrich Nietzsche once said "Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one".

Teaching is a job unlike others because you give your emotions and feeling when you do this job, unlike other job like programming (who cares if boss don't understand my coding, as long as it works) or engineering or any other job. Not everybody can teach even though they might have the knowledge because you need to be a good enough communicator that everyone understands what you are saying. How many of you have been taught by doctors or Professors but you do not have the foggiest notion what on earth they were talking about.

Sadly enough its one of the most low paying job compared to Engineers, IT professionals and accountants even though we are the one who train these people. I challenge people that do not agree with this statement to come and see me and I will show you the data that does not lie.

There are many challenges that lecturers today face, we have to help with the marketing, we have to mentor students, we have to do promotions, we have to write reports, most of which has nothing to do with education to prove how good we are in educating people. Lets not talk about the commercialization on the industry, how many times have you seen you fees increase during your study years.

Not to mention those idiots who at the name of optimization, put the class 6 hours in a row, assuming the lecturers plus students are robots that do not feel tired or hungry. How many of you have class for more that 4 straight hours, give me a hell yeah. According to the minister, you can have only 4 continuous hours of teaching for lecturers or students, but the timetable always change when there are audits. So much for ISO standards.

I see these situations slowly burning out and turning them into monsters.

I have heard from some of my ex students, some lecturers call them retards or degrading names when the students do not understand a point. I feel this is wrong cause your job is to help them understand the lectures. Calling degrading names will not help, and it just lowers your status as a lecturer, and people will lose respect for you, and remember respect cannot be bought.

Some lecturers are angry with their head, but scold the students at the smallest mistakes. You should take out your anger at the correct person and not snap at everyone else.

If you see any of the symptoms above, you should question yourself on whether you want to be a lecturer or just in it for the money.

When the time is right, I will just walk away from it all..

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