Letters | Don’t blame teachers for students’ struggles – they need help too
- Readers discuss teachers’ workloads in Hong Kong, the impact of travel regulations on diversity in the city, plans to improve safety at care homes for children, and a boar sighting along Bowen Road
It is true that there might be teachers who are more effective than others, just as is the case among members of any profession, including doctors, financial managers and engineers. But if students’ struggles in language learning are an alarming and citywide phenomenon, I am curious why your correspondent regards them as an indictment of teachers’ failures rather than of the failure of the whole education system.
Teachers as frontline workers have always borne the blame from students and parents for shortcomings in education while few actually look into the type of “support” that the Education Bureau provides them.
Teaching and catering to students’ individual needs is highly labour-intensive, yet each teacher of core subjects like Chinese and English is teaching at least a hundred different students per academic year, with almost two-thirds of their working hours spent inside a classroom teaching a class.
How can we expect teachers to address additional problems when they are teaching six lessons out of nine per day, and the other three periods scattered across the day are spent preparing for lessons and setting and marking students’ assignments? Where does the time come from if not from teachers’ personal time, which is supposed to be for family and rest?
The addition of new educational goals is never proportional to the additional provision of manpower for schools. Even if government funding is provided, is usually does not allow schools to hire extra full-time teachers who can be held accountable for meeting the new educational goals, but only to buy equipment or after-school services.
Unless more time can be freed up for teachers during the school day, expecting them to do more would just amount to exploitation.
Lisa Yeung, Tseung Kwan O
Exodus of foreigners will make our city less diverse
I am a Spanish citizen who has called Hong Kong home for the past 15 years. I got married at the Hong Kong Civil Registry, my two daughters were born at Queen Mary Hospital, and I own a business and a house here. I am not an expat. Hong Kong is home.
Like me, thousands of foreigners have fled Hong Kong in the past year – families who call the city home, qualified employees who bring diversity to the workforce, business owners who add colour to the entrepreneurial scene, children who enrich our schools.
Hong Kong is at a point of no return and the stakes are high: either the new government takes decisive action to open the gate and invite the international community back, or deal with the consequences of a society that is less diverse, less inclusive and less rich.
Veronica Llorca-Smith, Kennedy Town
More committees won’t improve child welfare
This scandal should have never happened, had the Social Welfare Department done its job properly. So many “care-takers” have been arrested, but nobody seems to be asking about the government officials in charge of this facility and others like it. Where are the responsible salary-takers?
Improving pay packages, raising foster care allowances and building new facilities – as mentioned in the article – are all welcome measures.
But the review report on the scandal suggested creating “service quality groups”, which would include justices of the peace as members, and tasking the groups with carrying out surprise checks on facilities. Is it really a good idea to involve more committees and groups?
Rest assured: as more organisations get involved, the less chances are that a problem will be solved. Instead, it will be shovelled around. So then will the blame be shovelled around.
Roland Guettler, Lai Chi Kok
Boar must be kept off popular walking path
I have recently returned to Hong Kong to reside and enjoy the relative serenity of exercising along Bowen Road, Wan Chai after work in the evening.
However, I often encounter a large wild boar that seems to be feeding on scraps laid out for it from the industrial bin adjacent to Bowen Road Park.
I am aware that pigs are viewed auspiciously in Chinese culture but there are obvious dangers with wild animals mingling with people and especially small children on this popular walking path and as such, they should at least be rehomed.
Timothy Begley, Wan Chai
