Every year many students attend public schools with
the desire to learn and acquire new knowledge and useful tools to form part of
a society and become better persons during their educational process. Students
attend the first day of school very excited. They want to meet their new
classmates and their teachers. Also they ask who is going to be the teacher in
charge of their grade during the whole year to help them every time they
require of him or her when they have a doubt or need an advice; but during those
first days of school they also realize that they are going to face many
problems that they did not expect as new students in a public school.
We have to be realistic and talk about the poor
conditions in which our public schools are. I could not talk with a student and
ask for an opinion, but I really have present a period in which I had to help a
teacher in a public school, so I can share my opinion and say that I lived the problems together
with the students in that public school. The first problem I faced when I
arrived to the school was that I had to help a teacher that was specialized in
other subject, but not in English. She did her best effort trying to teach
English to her students, but it was not her specialty, so it was kind of
complicated for her at the time to teach. I asked the principal why didn´t they
hire an English teacher? She answered me that they had asked for an English
teacher for that year, but they did not receive a response from the Department
of Education and the time to start classes was almost beginning, so they
decided to ask for a volunteer to impart the subject even when any of them was
an English teacher.
Another big surprise for me was that two of the grades
in this same school did not have classrooms where the students could receive
their classes in a normal and confortable way. The first days it was really difficult
to teach because they were exposed to many factors that made impossible to give
the classes in a normal way, for example the teacher had to speak really really
loud because of the noise from the other grades and because the students did
not pay too much attention and get distracted easily where they were located. After
some days the students were located in two temporary classrooms made by themselves
and their parents but they had no walls so they continue with the same problem
of the noise and the distractions. After a time the teacher and the students get
accustomed to the noise, but then they faced another problem: the weather. Without
no walls when raining it was hard and really sad to see them in those
classrooms.
Now I do not know if they solved those problems or
they continue in the same way, but we have to think how difficult are the
situations that are going through many school, not only in the case of the
school I used as example but for other schools that maybe are facing more
difficult problems at the time to receive the students every year and do not
have the best conditions to do their jobs.
