A couple of days before, the announcement for 2020 best teacher awards were made public. Social media was abuzz in congratulating and encouraging the budding teachers who out of thousands were selected for this prestigious award. From valley also three lucky teachers were awarded including one female teacher from Zone Gulabagh of Srinagar district. The Directorate office, concerned Chief Education Officers, teachers forums of all cadres without wasting a second fetched congratulatory messages through their official social media pages and through their offices as well. I too congratulate the trio for winning this year’s best teacher award from the core of my heart. Like me the entire teaching guild gets surprised every year on the day, these awards are announced. They want to enquire the higher ups at the helm of affairs with regard to the criteria and method adopted to select these lucky awardees who out of thousands are being labeled as best teachers. From a layman’s view, one can describe a best teacher as the one who is dedicated to his profession, always arrives at his duties at sharp time and leaves the duties only after the expiry of duty hours, delivers all the assigned lessons in the classes with utmost zeal and zest, so that his students comprehend easily his goods and after all the progress report or results of the students speak louder than the voice of teachers. If these parameters are put into practice, this not only will choose the really best teachers amongst the thousands, but the already derailed education system will get overhauled automatically. Further these parameters need to be monitored and focused by an honest and efficient authority who at Zonal, District, Provincial and national level should be associated only with this job for the whole year, so that factual annual progress report of teachers based on each parameter is synthesized and on the basis of said report the awardees are selected.
Even a common person not associated with the teaching profession must realize the performance and dedication of the designated best teachers but irony is that even the teaching guild suspects the method adopted to choose them and if they ever aspire to be in the race of winning the award, the obscure method will never let them to realize this wish.
The colleagues of teachers, students and the immediate boss/Head of the institution are the actual judge of the teachers performance. I have been in the department for last eleven years. During all these years I along with rest of my colleagues view the method of choosing the best teacher awardees through the prism of suspicion because one wonders how the selected one’s are being monitored, who watched their lessons in the classroom, from whom did they get their performance report. Had results and good teaching been the only criteria, everybody without any doubt would have believed on the best performance of teachers and consequently on the teacher awards. I have worked with many dedicated and ultra hardworking teachers during my tenure, my other colleagues too realised their dedication and brilliance but we all feel disgusted on the occasion of best teacher award announcements the movement we don’t figure their names amongst them. At my earlier posting ie Govt BHS Khanan Kangan, two well known teachers namely Farooq Ahmad Raina and Mushtaq Ahmad Magray were so much dedicated and honest to their profession that everyone among staff members, students and society often acclaimed their hard work. Unfortunately their hardwork and dedication was never recognized by the authorities or officials managing the affairs of best teacher awards only due to faulty obscure mechanism. There may be hundreds or thousands of such noble teachers who teache their students with dedication and honesty and also reap good fruits in the form of results but due to utter negligence or faulty mechanism, they are neither encouraged nor their hardwork is being recognised. Even a common person not associated with the teaching profession must realize the performance and dedication of the designated best teachers but irony is that even the teaching guild suspects the method adopted to choose them and if they ever aspire to be in the race of winning the award, the obscure method will never let them to realize this wish. Hope in near future the concerned authorities will come up with a logistic method, the method then given wide publicity so that every teacher finds himself in the race of getting the best teacher award.
(Author teaches at Govt BHS Anderwan . Views are his own)[email protected]
