There is no doubt that the National Teaching Awards (NTA) are our
teaching profession’s answer to the Oscars. In the plush environs of the Presidential Guest House in Pretoria, dignitaries and NTA finalists (plus the odd scruffy journalist like me) gather in their Sunday best to congratulate each other on excellent performances in the theatre of the classroom.
If I sound a bit sarcastic about the affair, it’s probably just some of my reservations coming out about the very idea of singling out a good, a better and a best from a teaching body of hundreds of thousands.
Of course, the NTA carefully avoids this language (the winning teacher is described as the ‘first finalist”), but the notion of a competition that sets out to identify the best teachers in the land still strikes me as dodgy. But in my heart-of-hearts, I have to admit that I fall for the occasion hook, line and sinker. I love the teachers I meet there, for one thing. This time I was lucky enough to sit next to Nomsa Tlomatsana, an early childhood development teacher from Limpopo, and Rhona Peters, from a primary school in KwaZulu-Natal.
Nomsa told me of no less than 800 kiddies at her school, with too few classrooms — resulting in a single educator being faced with as many as 57 young ones at a time (can you imagine the noise!). Rhona shared her experience of how inclusion can, indeed, work, if you make the effort to educate yourself and then your colleagues about successful strategies.
It’s not just that I relish their stories, and this brief opportunity to share a space with such inspiring people; it’s also that I love seeing their own personal glee as their names are announced, and full of smiles and pride, they have their two minutes with the dignitaries on the stage. It really does work, this NTA event: these teachers soak up the attention as the ‘thank you” that the function is meant to represent. But several comments by the keynote speaker of the night, Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel, continue to bother me.
After much praise for the role of teachers in society, he went on, with an appropriately sombre face, to say: ‘Sadly we live in a world of distorted values” where society gives less recognition — and financial reward — to teachers than it does to money managers, for example.
It is the apparent fatalism of the statement that bothers me. It is as if this distortion is beyond human power to rectify and therefore we must all humbly submit. And this coming from Manuel, who surely is one among us with the influence actually to alter this skewed world order!
Worse was when Manuel went on to note that a survey has shown ‘a correlation between income and happiness”. Alas, poor teachers! While Manuel sees it’s all wrong, he is destined to be both rich and happy, while educators will do their jobs for much less pay in misery.
But don’t you worry! Perhaps you can become a finalist yourself one day, and be feasted and fêted for at least four hours — at a grateful state’s expense.