Don’t be carried away by monetary considerations — GNAT General Secretary advises young teachers
The General Secretary of the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), Mr David Ofori Acheampong, has advised young teachers not to be carried away by financial benefits of the profession but the welfare of the children under their care.
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He said the most important thing should be the impact they make in the lives of their students as “from their mouths come curses and blessings.”
Mr Acheampong who was speaking at the second quadrennial youth summit of the GNAT at the Teachers Village at Abankro, near Ejisu on Monday, said teaching placed a lot of responsibilities on the teacher and urged them to discharge their duties effectively.
According to him, the teaching profession placed a huge responsibility on teachers such that at any given time, a large number of students were placed under their care and “it is your responsibility to develop them to become better than you.”
Contact hours
On the issue of loss contact hours by teachers, the General Secretary said the Ghana Education Service (GES) was part to blame for that.
According to him, as long as the service will continue to organise workshops for teachers when schools were in session, the problem will persist.
The ideal thing , he said, would be for the service to organise those workshops when schools were on vacation so that the teachers would be able to attend without having to organise extra classes for the students to make up for the time loss.
Again, he said the service should take a second look at the practice where students were made to march during the Independence Day parade.
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He said Ghana was also quick to compare standards in the country to other developed countries but always failed to compare the practices in those countries to what pertained here.
Mr Acheampong asked how many of those countries took their students out of the classrooms for two weeks to rehearse for a two-hour march past.
According to him, all those contributed to the loss of contact hours that the service kept complaining about.
He said the teachers were ready to discharge their duties and pleaded with the service to remove some of those impediments from their way to enable them to do their work.
Summit
The youth summit which is on the theme: “Transforming Societies through Education: the Role of Stakeholders and Young Educators” is being attended by 140 youth coordinators drawn from all the 10 regions of the country.
The summit is to serve as mentorship programme for the young teachers who would in turn serve as role models for their peers in their districts and impart the knowledge acquired at the summit to them.
The summit was also to prepare and educate the participants on the membership drive of the association and how they could use their position and profession to impact society positively.