Teaching teachers

We all hear horror stories about impossibly inept trainee teachers or freshly minted ones, and we might even laugh at their incompetence. Every now and then, we will even personally encounter one, and we will haughtily correct their every mistake, all the while shrinking their already miniscule confidence. Like it or not, noob teachers are as much a part of the school environment as stinky toilets.

Deep down inside, I have always thought that these 'teachers' must have sucked really bad in whatever course they happen to be majoring at in whatever overhyped local university, only to assure myself that they could not suck that much. After all, they did get into university right? Wrong. Today there was an interesting piece on Bachelor of Education (B. Ed) graduates in one of our local newspapers. And boy, was it enlightening. I was not that interested in the whole article itself, but for one minor fact. One of the recent graduates interviewed had a CGPA of 2.64. 2.64, dammit! That's like an average of C! For God's sake, can't she do better than that? And the bigwigs in their fat armchairs expect us to learn from teachers who cannot even hold their own.

For some reason I doubt that this is an isolated case. In fact, I personally feel 2.64 is pretty generous for that undergrad and does not reflect her average capabilities. I do not mean to be racially biased, but my gut tells me that she got a 4.0 or 3.xx in her Islamic Civilisation subject to pull up her grades. Not that there's anything wrong with that, if she wants to teach that subject that is.

Well, this is what we get for training teachers like an assembly line. Not that there's anything wrong with that too, but another gut feeling tells me that the raw material sent in does not exactly conform to SIRIM standards.