Teachers, Babysitters

Teachers form the largest chunk of civil servants in Bhutan. With their huge salaries they take up a sizeable percentage of salaries for civil servants and all this in a time when the state of education in our country is going downhill. It’s time we put things in perspective and pay them for exactly what they do – babysit our children!

Yes, that’s right. Let’s pay them by the hour and only for those days that they’re actually in school, not for all the planning time at home or the time that they spend before or after school.

The school starts at 8.30am and ends at 4.30pm in the afternoon with an hour’s lunch break. That is eight hours minus one hour and that comes to seven hours of work. On Saturdays, 8.30am to 1pm; half an hour short of five hours. These are normal official timings.

An academic year begins on 10th February and ends on 18th December, that’s 312 days. Take away two weeks of summer holidays, we’re not going to pay them for their vacations – that comes to 312-14=298 days.

Let’s give them Nu.50 per child per day, so with the average class strength being 30, that works out to 50 X 30 = 1500 per day, and for 298 actual days in school, it comes to 298 X 1500 = 4,47,000.

Now, since teachers get their salaries for all 12 months of the year, Nu.4,47,000 comes to Nu.37,250 a month.

Wait a minute, there’s something wrong here – the highest salary any teacher receives in Bhutan is around Nu.30,000 and the average teacher salary works out to around Nu.18,000, or even less than that.

That works out to 18,000 x 12 = 2,16,000 which divided by 298 days is Nu.725 a day, and that further divided by the 30 children in each class is just Nu.24 per child per day. That is even less than the pocket money parents give their children these days.

Wow, that’s a really inexpensive baby-sitter, and they even educate our kids! Now that’s one hell of a deal!

Not only do they spend five to seven hours a day in class teaching, all the while standing and inhaling chalk dust, they also have to plan those lessons and afterwards, correct the students’ books, day in and day out.

Along with that they have to take part in co-curricular and extra-curricular activities with their students – gardening, cleaning up, dance practice, sports practice, club activities, and in schools which have boarding facilities, they have to supervise morning and evening reading time, their meals, prayers etc.

On top of everything, teachers are expected to be role models for their students. They not only have to behave in the highest levels of civility at all times, they also have the enormous task of imparting value education on to their students.

Here, I’m not even mentioning much about the difficulties faced by teachers who are posted in far-flung villages which are two or three days away from the nearest road head, without electricity and facing severe teacher shortages.

Despite being blamed for the degrading level of our education system, and being chronically underappreciated and overworked, at Nu.25 a day per child, I guess they’re doing more than their money’s worth.

(Adapted from a chain mail circulated in Facebook. The original note can be read here: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=666995678863&id=71209634 )