Rant Rant Rant

It’s been a while since I wrote in this community and that’s been because lately, I’ve been trying to keep my personal life a bit more private, especially now that many of my in-real life friends are on Hive. Lol I really need to get this quick one out of my system though because I’ve been sitting with it for like 3 days now and it just keeps pissing me off.

A bit of context

Right now, I’m teaching Biology at SHS as a Lead for Ghana fellow. At the school I was posted to, I’ve been assigned to teach second year and third year Agricultural Science students. But I’ve been sort of forced to take on an additional role of teaching third year students as well now by the supposed third year Biology teacher.

The headmaster of the school we’re currently at mistakenly introduced my colleague and I as “Volunteers”(We’re not), and it seems this third year teacher took the “Volunteer” label too serious. He basically cornered me into teaching the third year class by asking me to “help” him teach them extra class. Now myself, I don’t have a problem with taking on extra work. In fact, I had plans of teaching them extra class myself already.

My problem is the approach he used to get me to do it. What he told me was that he would be teaching the extra class himself, but wanted me to step in on his behalf on days he would not be present. Then on the day we agreed to announce our intentions to the students, we went together to the third year classes and he told them I will be teaching them extra class now. This caught me off guard cos that was not what we agreed prior. I didn’t want to have a disagreement with him or anything in front of the students, so I said nothing to him, and simply introduced myself to the students.

The issue is that right now, I don’t have a lot of time for even myself because I’m trying to do a lot of things, so even the extra class I was planning to start for the students was something I planned to start later. Maybe in the next 3 months.

The Lead for Ghana fellowship is very demanding because even though we teach, that is not all we do. We have many other responsibilities that require our attention. So I wanted to take on the extra class after I am able to fully adjust to everything, then tweak my schedule to fit it in.

Now thanks to this extra class, in addition to my regular hours, my Wednesday and Friday nights are occupied and I’m not prepared for the stress teaching this extra class long term will come with. Of course, I want to help the students, but now is just not when I planned for that on my timeline.

There’s more

As if this wasn’t enough, the same teacher also approached me literally 2 days before our exam question submissions were due to ask me to set exam questions for the class he teach cos “he’ll be traveling”. I had two problems with that.

First, I don’t have the time cos I am already extremely busy, exhausted, and racing against the same deadline to submit my own questions for my students. Second, these are NOT my students. I didn’t teach them, so how exactly do you want me to be able to assess their understanding when I don’t even know what they were taught. I actually raised the second point to him.

But of course, he tried to find a way out by telling me he’ll just give me a list of the topics he taught and I can just set the question. But even that doesn’t solve the problem. Okay, I know what topics you did, but what exactly did you teach them? What did you say in class, based on which I can assess them? Did you teach all the topics under Strand A? What type of learners are your students? Sooo many discrepancies and concerns.

I thought that bringing all these up will get him to understand why he has to be the one to set his questions, but that didn’t work. So I’m writing this post, 2 days after the deadline has passed for both of us to submit our questions, because I had to work on questions for both classes starting Friday, and taking up my entire weekend.

I enjoy teaching a lot. I just discovered that about myself. But right now, I really just can’t take any more extra work on top of what I’m already assigned. That’l be too much on my plate. I plan to be very unapologetically clear about taking on anymore responsibilities at this point because I’m starting to realize that if I don’t draw a line, I might just become the go-to guy to delegate responsibilities to.

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