Bob Kisiki
When education shifted from the physical classroom for the ordinary Ugandan child, parents and school managers had lots of adjusting to do.
People who had never looked at the laptop as something more than that gadget where they do excel spreadsheets for the end-of-month financial records or the staff timesheets, began to learn new terminologies such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, muting and so on.
Parents who had always barred their children from using their (the parents’) phones now had to let the children attend class on those smartphones, then hand over the gadgets towards the end of the day. Things had suddenly changed.
And now they have changed again. The classrooms have been reopened. Visitation days will soon recur. School open days and cultural days and founders days and all manner of other serious and frivolous days will return to the termly or annual calendars. And all of them will demand that you adjust and plan to be a part of them.
But this is not all. Children who have spent two years studying under a constrained and highly limited (and maybe limiting) environment are now back in the wider space of classrooms, laboratories, dining halls, main halls, sports arenas and even gardens.
So you have a scenario where the one teacher responsible for practical agriculture will single-handedly have to accompany 50 rowdy teens to the school farm, a kilometre away from the school main campus. We are back to the system where two duty teachers and a body of 27 prefects — themselves teenagers — will have to ensure that a community of 1,700 children, who have been out of the system for two years, go for sports all over the compound: in the chess room, the hockey pitch, the running track and so on, and that when they get there, they engage in permissible activities.
We can get this even a lot messier than it is here so far. Are you aware that some schools have up to 50% new teachers; meaning that those who knew and understood your children are elsewhere, managing their fleets of bodas, running their retail shops, farming or even running to the field to collect news as reporters for big media houses, and the new teachers themselves need orientation in how the system works, so they cannot attend to your child ably?
Dear parent, the perpetual stay in school of your child should not continue to be the sole responsibility of the school. Ensuring that your child behaves well and obeys the school rules can no longer be left to the teaching staff and prefects.
This is when you get practically involved yourself, like you’ve never done before. This is when weekly calls to the school to follow up on the child’s discipline should become a part of your regular schedule.
Remember how, during the lockdown, you cursed repeatedly because you were out of options on how to rein in your marauding daughter, who had become a menace to the neighbourhood.
That girl, and 500 other teens who had become little pirates in your locality, are back in school, and will require taming. Work with the teachers; the days when parents shouted at teachers when summoned to attend to the children’s lack of social manners have ended.
The writer is a parenting counsellor and a teacher
