“If you can read this, thank a teacher”

“A courage which looks easy and yet is rare; the courage of a teacher repeating day after day the same lessons - the least rewarded of all forms of courage” – Honore de Balzac

If you attended school in Ghana, West Africa, or I daresay any African country, you have probably been lashed/received corporal punishment. I remember all six teachers who ever lashed me; two of course being my parents. I never cried. I was a big boy. I was close a few times though—my classmates at Mfantsipim can tell you about one. But these traumatic experiences do not form the basis of my memories. I can tell you the names of at least 90% of my teachers so far from Ms. Amenyui through Mr. Azasoo, Frimpong, Collins Aguzey, “Harriso wo yɛ tall”, “Adorable – Paul Adu Kumi, “Coomson aka Fuck”, “Baffoeman, Yeboaman, “Borlɛɛ”, “Karishika/Matriculation”, “Duncanman aka “The Son of Man”, “Aboa Apɔnkye” to “Duoduman”.

From Louis Baffoe intoning “you are mad!” because I screwed up a mathematical calculation to Aboa Apɔnkye teaching us temperature was the sixth sense and that HIV stood for “Highly Infections Virus” (it stands for Human Immunodeficiency Virus by the way), there are many unique stories by which we remember our teachers. I recall Mr. Kusi forcing us to buy his useless pamphlets, Karishika skipping English periods while trying to induce our paying her for extra classes and Borlɛɛ’s tag line “as for you Edo, you are a baaaaaaaaaaaad boy” anytime I went for an exeat (signed permission to leave school) for the town of Cape Coast. I also remember Yeboahman allowing me to attend his high-cost but effective extra classes in Physics for free, Baffoeman lending me his Math texts for study, “Adorable” buying me an English-French dictionary, and Duoduman screening World Cup matches at his house. What I’m saying is my development as an individual and my success as a student has been entirely due to my teachers. Same could be said for the larger majority of my friends. So why are they paid so little?

I was a rebel growing up – at home that is. In school, I was always an angel, well, with the teachers anyways. Maybe it was fear of corporal punishment. Whatever, it worked. In my village, teachers wielded extraordinary power that extended to time outside school. A parent could request punishment of kids for some wrong committed at home. When teachers decreed that funerals were no place for children, it meant you did not want to be seen at a funeral by a teacher or, God forbid, the headmaster. And you did not want them to catch you doing something wrong outside of school. Teachers were our moral compasses, our role models, our number one fans, our most severe critics and our fiercest supporters.

There were inspections on Monday mornings for cleanliness – white socks, washed and pressed uniform, hair cut short, fingernails clipped, teeth brushed, it was a beauty. And this was outside of the fact they were actually doing teaching in the classrooms. When I was practicing my cursives in the sand under the big Neem tree in Dabala, it was a teacher who held my hands. And it was a teacher who taught me about “Air Pressure” and how I could turn a glass of water upside down with covering as flimsy as a cardboard and it wouldn’t spill.

The most widely heard saying in Ghana regarding teachers, however, remained “a teacher’s reward is in heaven”. But is it? I have been wondering about how society judges the value of different services. In Ghana, we were of the view that the US valued its teachers more and that they were among the highest earners in the country. How wrong we were! Teachers earn a pittance here and, it seems, everywhere else. How can that be? I do not know much about the requirements for teaching in the US but at least in my country, this usually involves attending a three-year Teacher Training College, a tertiary institution. The admission criteria for these schools are less stringent than for four year universities which meant they became places for students who did not make the college grade. One can then boost her pay grade, albeit marginally, by attending a “mature” students degree course in university although most look at this as an escape from teaching. Rather than fault this set-up, however, I fault the human condition.

Society as a whole is obsessed with education and the level of education achieved resulting in pay levels increasing as you achieve higher and higher levels of education even if your degree is as useless as Latin outside of the catholic church. No, I am not arguing against education. Ask my family, it’s the only thing I seem to offer them when we speak—go back to school, get another degree and the like. But shouldn’t the future value of a person’s work be indicated in their remuneration?

A profession which seems to be at the extreme end of this value-based remuneration is medicine where doctors are paid large amounts of money for barely keeping a patient alive. Even here, primary care doctors who save the system hills of money by preventing complications before they arise earn the least pay. What influences the value of a man’s work seems steeped more in how immediate the results are than what the actual contribution to society over time is of his work.

We are blinded by the college graduates who generate millions sometimes doing mind-numbing work on Wall Street so we pay them in loads and cap it all by giving some CEOs significant portions of GDP even when companies fail. But we are unable to foresee the fact that we would have a society of illiterates and no professionals without the teacher. Imagine a society without doctors, lawyers, businessmen, farmers, historians, technicians, to mention a few. We’d be back in the ice age in no time.

Supply and demand and the curse of Adam Smith continue to numb us into decreasing the reward of teachers because, well, they are easily replaceable. They are, of course. But is this enough to keep their pay low? Imagine waking up each day, writing the same teaching plans albeit modified for the characteristics of the class that year, standing in front of students and repeating the same information over and over again. And most of them do it faithfully and cheerfully, knowing the only reward they have is hearing of their students who made it. And the only way they could ever be rich, at least in Ghana, is go into politics and become parliamentarians.

So even though it is not teachers’ day today, shout outs to all my teachers, past and present. Part of your rewards are in heaven all right but the larger part is in our pockets as a society and especially, in those of our politicians. I pray one day it is returned to you.

Prime

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This is the way I choose, the destiny I pursue
To help the unfit and the fit
To treat each according to his need
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