The Piper

Let’s have a little thought adventure for a change today. Disclaimer: may be factually inaccurate, may be harmful for consumption by readers above 18.

Here’s a hypothetical teacher, ostensibly stuck between two hard places. Say hello.

Now, let us assume that this teacher needs to do more than meeting requirements to get something good, say, a performance bonus or a happy boss. Perhaps more importantly, this teacher doesn’t want to get blacklisted from a promotion or something. Let’s picture this teacher in charge of a uniformed group.

Oh dear. That’s probably one of the most time- and effort-intensive categories of CCAs, you say.

The presumed KPI of a uniformed group would be the awards it garners. This award might be based on a basket of statistics which is either available at HQ or has to be submitted to HQ. Many, if not most, of these statistics are quantitative and just happen to be dependent on the students in this uniformed group. For the purposes of this adventure, attendance, awards garnered at competitions, fund-raisers (for non-National groups) and other varied accolades will be the only ones factored in.

Therefore, for this teacher to get a good grade, attendance/awards/moneys must be collected.

Therefore, of course this teacher wants good attendance/awards/moneys. Let’s focus first on the touchy issue, attendance. Of course, there are the handful of truants in any batch. What do you expect this teacher to do? Why, make lots of noise in various modes about this, and cajole, sweet-talk, coax, persuade, induce, make or force the student into attending this uniformed group! Strangely, more often than not, this type of teacher will be more than happy to accept excuses instead of having someone simply play truant.

The weirdways usually begin to open when the teacher decides to play hardball with a ‘recalcitrant’ offender. Sometimes, to persuade the offender that there is some concession being made, other actions might get misrepresented. Maybe, everyone else has been whacked already? Or, the guilt-trip method, you’re the only one who’s messing up my stats for x session!
Now, that’s relatively above-the-board tactics, until you wonder – are these statements for real? If it isn’t, is there something wrong with this? After all, the end (offender no longer offends, voluntarily or under duress) justify the means, yes?

Moving on, awards means competitions. Competitions, usually means you need people. Do students get forced to go? Sometimes these competitions will not benefit the students directly, and might instead create more trouble by taking away time from them that might theoretically have been spent on Homework, Assignments, Projects, etc.

Lastly, fund raising – walkathons, raffles, the like. This is apparently a major part of rankings for the unit awards – so, teacher sets a high, desirable and ‘achievable’ target (for students) and awards students who have hit this target with some reward or another. If students really do the sales on a best-effort basis (keeping in mind the number of youths in uniformed groups all over the island), it will probably be difficult to hit the typical targets seen in ‘elite’ schools. So how? The teacher pressures all students to hit this target, somehow, even if it means them buying it from themselves or having the parents do that – not very different, since the money is from the same source!

Definitely, this teacher would be considered more than meets requirements, going above and beyond the mandated duties!

The big question: Would the teacher in this scenario be considered a good teacher? [0]