If you ask some teachers who have been in the service for a while, they might refer to their teacher training period in NIE as a "honeymoon". That cannot be further from the truth for current students in NIE. Our lecturers tell us that when the teacher training course was upgraded from diploma to postgraduate diploma, the NIE administration decided to up the workload of the trainee teachers to reflect the more demanding "postgraduate" nature of the course.
I suspect that cannot be the complete story, but taken at face value this sounds ridiculous. It sounds like giving more homework for the sake of giving more homework. Something which we were told not to do to our own students. A recurring theme of studying in NIE is the irony of our lecturers and tutors doing to us precisely what they told us not to do to our students.
But the main crux of the issue is that the workload is so demanding that its education value is diminished. We are so short of time to meet deadlines (which are all very close to each other) for all our various assignments and projects that we often have no choice but to sacrifice quality and effort just to complete our work on time. For example, I feel that if I have more time to read journals and think over my research paper on Educational Psychology, not only would I produce a better essay, the greater effort spent reading and thinking about the issue would (assumedly) translate down to me being a better teacher. At this rate however, we are so pressed for time we are just writing to reach the word limit so that we can start on the next piece of work. We are so rushed just to fulfill minimum requirements such that most of the potential learning value in our assigned work is lost. Giving students sufficient time to benefit maximally from our assigned work is something taught to us from our lecturers too. Recurring theme, anyone?
It is then not surprising that many teachers say that NIE is but a waste of time? Lots of theory but in the end nothing applicable for actual teaching "out there"? Some lecturers even tell us to "just pass and get out" of NIE so that we can start learning how to teach proper (on the job). I am not that skeptical yet. I do see the value, or intended value, in the stuff that they are trying to teach us. But once you pile up the work on us, we can't benefit from that. To give them credit, my lecturers say that they realize the problem and the curriculum review committee is working on it. One hopes the situation will improve for future batches of trainee teachers, but from what we heard from previous years, such hope may be unwarranted.
During our first day in orientation, the deans spoke to us and told us that "time management" is paramount in being a successful trainee teacher. Please. This is equivalent to giving your students too much homework and then chastising them for not being diligent enough to complete all the work. Have I mentioned, recurring theme?
I suspect that cannot be the complete story, but taken at face value this sounds ridiculous. It sounds like giving more homework for the sake of giving more homework. Something which we were told not to do to our own students. A recurring theme of studying in NIE is the irony of our lecturers and tutors doing to us precisely what they told us not to do to our students.
But the main crux of the issue is that the workload is so demanding that its education value is diminished. We are so short of time to meet deadlines (which are all very close to each other) for all our various assignments and projects that we often have no choice but to sacrifice quality and effort just to complete our work on time. For example, I feel that if I have more time to read journals and think over my research paper on Educational Psychology, not only would I produce a better essay, the greater effort spent reading and thinking about the issue would (assumedly) translate down to me being a better teacher. At this rate however, we are so pressed for time we are just writing to reach the word limit so that we can start on the next piece of work. We are so rushed just to fulfill minimum requirements such that most of the potential learning value in our assigned work is lost. Giving students sufficient time to benefit maximally from our assigned work is something taught to us from our lecturers too. Recurring theme, anyone?
It is then not surprising that many teachers say that NIE is but a waste of time? Lots of theory but in the end nothing applicable for actual teaching "out there"? Some lecturers even tell us to "just pass and get out" of NIE so that we can start learning how to teach proper (on the job). I am not that skeptical yet. I do see the value, or intended value, in the stuff that they are trying to teach us. But once you pile up the work on us, we can't benefit from that. To give them credit, my lecturers say that they realize the problem and the curriculum review committee is working on it. One hopes the situation will improve for future batches of trainee teachers, but from what we heard from previous years, such hope may be unwarranted.
During our first day in orientation, the deans spoke to us and told us that "time management" is paramount in being a successful trainee teacher. Please. This is equivalent to giving your students too much homework and then chastising them for not being diligent enough to complete all the work. Have I mentioned, recurring theme?
