Yagoob’s Dome

Recently, much talk has been about the long awaited 15-1%  10-1% payrise in the public sector and there was much anger and panic that teachers would be once again left out only to be reassured that teachers will be included in the payrise in the local newspapers.

Also over the summer, the recruitment of new teachers has been a point of political crisis spearheaded by Al-Wefaq accusing the Ministry of Education of hiring teachers from Arab countries and overlooking Bahraini graduates and leaving them unemployed.

The summer period is when the mass employment occurs and job applications are given and the applicants attend exams and interviews for teaching jobs. Male Bahraini applicants were noticeably low (I know this because the recruitment department use the classrooms that are right next to my office and see them on a daily basis for 1-2 weeks).

Now some of these Bahraini applicants are unfortunately not up to scratch either with poor knowledge in their field of study (Most of the applicants are graduates from the University of Bahrain) or do badly on their interview.

Naturally if you don’t do well in either your exam or interview you won’t get hired.. Simple, eh?

Not in Bahrain..

Yet, you may argue that some of these graduates were not employed straight after they graduate when they’re ‘fresh’, so many of them fail in the exam due to the fact that they have become ‘rusty’ after years of waiting.

Even the ones who do pass and become teachers are not neccessarily good ones, the Ministry still trains a lot of teachers on the material in the curiculum! Stuff they got their degree on. These programmes take a lot of time and effort from the ministry,when they should really be concentrating on updating teachers on how to integrate new teaching methods and technology into their teaching.

But this isn’t what this post is really about..

It’s about the teachers’ society

The Bahrain teachers’ society have been extremely busy as of late with their push trying to pressurize the high authorities in the ministry to listen to their suggestions on the much postponed cadre which has become more like بيض الصعو

The society is headed by a Al-Wefaq member (who also ran in last year’s parlimentary elections and lost) and most of the members are ‘Wefaqis’ , and many of their demonstrations are attended by other Wefaqi MPs.

Now I’m not against what they are doing, on the contrary I salute them, they are doing well in expressing the problems that teachers from both Sunni and Shia sects are facing but what is getting on my nerves are a couple of things:

1. It saddens me that other MPs from the other blocs in our Parliament (with some being former teachers and one of them even taught me at school!) are not contributing or helping in sorting out teachers problems.
2. The majority of Sunni teachers are not participating or joining the society and helping their fellow teachers in solving their problems, even though they are affected by the poor conditions their fellow Shia teachers are feeling and bitch about them as much as they do, but act as if they live the best life they could live without problems.

اليد الوحدة ما تصفق يا جماعة

You can’t clap with one hand

If only teachers learn, they wouldn’t be in such a mess as one of my friends, whose also a teacher in a school says:

Even shit is treated better than teachers in our schools, at least they drop in clean water whilst we get shit from everywhere, from our senior teachers, principals and parents and worst of all, the students!

Sorry for the extremely long post!

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 16th, 2007 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Bahrainian Stuff, Technology and Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.