Speak out: Students and teachers, let’s aim high

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

THE National Achievement Test (NAT) is so near to be conducted both in the secondary and elementary level for school year 2011–2012.

Who is the great hero for today’s national and international sports? How did he become a hero for boxing? Pacman had started from lower level competition then up to the international boxing arena because he never stopped dreaming to become a hero. We see him spent most of his time practicing. He perspires a lot.

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So with us teachers, we have to coach our pupils before the academic competition comes this March 2012. We must aim to hit a high mark after the national achievement test for it really shows the picture of our school’s performance and our commitment for quality education.

Why there is such a NAT? This is one way of knowing how we taught our pupils for the five major subjects. The pupils’ NAT scores show how we implement our lesson plans and our innovations in the preparation of instructional materials.

As a part of our school base management practices in our school – Poitan Elementary School, we usually conduct Saturday classes from January to March. This is in order to reinforce the lesson to Grades VI and III pupils.

January 14, 21, 29; February 4, 11, 18, 25; and March 3 were the days designated as our review days for NAT. There were two groups of teachers willing to sacrifice their weekends to help conduct the review classes.

Group 1 consists of Grades I–III teachers to conduct the review for Grade III pupils. Meanwhile, group 2 consists of Grade IV, V, VI teachers and the school head to review with the Grade VI pupils.

These review classes are one of our strategies in raising the performance of our school aside from the conduct of remedial reading class for English. It is our team agreement to work out to hit our school’s goal, our vision and mission.

During the first day of review class, all Grade III pupils were present while in Grade VI, four were absent because of the bad weather. The school head Lourdes Bitog with a teacher, Shirley Ann Rimas started the review.

When we teach, our goal is for the pupils to be educated to become our future partners in community development for they will take over our task when we get old. Therefore, in teaching our youth today, we are creating real citizens for our nation in order for our country to combat for international globalization.

We aim high for our school not for our personal satisfaction but for our clients to be fully equipped with all the necessary skills in order for them to combat today’s economic crisis and eradicate illiteracy.

Well, we teachers are usually the unrecognized hero of yesterday, today and even tomorrow maybe. However, as a teacher, we feel very happy when our pupils hit even a little of the set target we prepared. Hence, we educators should always set a plan to be accomplished by our school with the proper coordination of our stakeholders.

It is a good habit to always aim very high and strive to hit the point. Never stop dreaming to be on top. As teachers, we never grow old because we always deal with young kids hence; we keep smiling as our way of motivating our students to do well.