The numerous duties of teachers

Nguyen Thanh Hang, a secondary school teacher, said she is so busy that she can only finish the school work and return home at 7 pm every day.

Hang, as a head teacher of seventh graders, has to be present at school 30 minutes before the first lesson begins at 7.30 am each day, no matter whether she has teaching duties on that day.

The morning school shift finishes at 12 pm, but she has to stay at school for one hour more to update the information about the lessons’ results. She also has to meet with misbehaving students and release punishment decisions.

Hang has to spend the afternoon to prepare her lesson plans, mark test papers, receive students’ parents or try to contact them to discuss how to educate their children. She almost has no time to care for her 2-year-old child. That duty has been largely assigned to her husband and the grandparents.

Lai Thi May, a young teacher, complained that she feels powerless when educating disobedient students.

At pedagogical school, May was told that she needs to talk with the parents of troublesome students to ask them to cooperate. When May told a student who was always truant that she needed to meet his parents, the student replied that he was not sure if the parents would come.

May finally decided to come to the student’ home to meet his parents. And then she realized she could not expect their cooperation. His father was always drunk, while his mother was far away on business.

The young teacher, while affirming that she still loves the teaching profession very much, admits that she sometimes loses her appetite over a disobedient student. Despite her great efforts to re-educate the boy, she still has been regularly criticized by the school’s board of management.

Teachers not respected enough

“Teachers nowadays are between a hammer and anvil,” commented Le Huu Luong, a high school teacher in Hanoi.

“The hammer”, Luong continued, is the school’s leaders, who always ask teachers to produce good students who can gain high achievements. Meanwhile, the “anvil” is the students and parents, who always complain that teachers don’t spend enough time and effort to educate their children.

khanhvankshb@..., a reader, who introduced himself in anemail to the editorial board as an old teacher, thinks that teachers nowadays are not given the power necessary to educate students.

“In the past, we had the right to scold students who made mistakes. But now we cannot, or we will lose our job,” he explained.

Viet Khanh, a young teacher, commented on an education forum that she has been advised to turn a deaf ear to students’ problems, or she would get into troubles.