Teaching at a college of National University
With shortage of teaching stuff, it is an absolutely Herculean task to take care of classes properly
Md Shafiullah
In an exam I was asked to write about weaknesses and strengths of National University of Bangladesh (NU). My two-year service at an affiliated college of national university didnt favor me to come up with any concrete answer. I was using passive sentences and ambiguous words to depict national university. At the very end of that write up, I found some stunning response like its involvement to make higher education available in rural and tribal areas, to include female students whom parents are not allowing them to leave home city for public university, and to boost employment for a section of youths of our country.
Besides, I know, National University of Bangladesh is the second largest university in the world by enrollment after Indira Gandhi National Open University. It provides nation with higher education with 2254 affiliated colleges and more than two million students.
This realization allured me to write a few points as recommendations. But I fell again in a mess. Found no perfect point to start except one obvious idea that academic environment must be improved to maximize the opportunity of providing education to the largest student pool of the country.
Things are highly complicated to consider form one sides. The multi-party stakes in the university makes it too flappy to run smoothly. National University administration, government colleges, non-government colleges, teachers from BCS education cadre are the prime actors work for providing higher education for the largest segment of students. In absence of any win-win platform theses stakeholders are usually found working individually rather than a team.
Teachers of government colleges are those BCS cadre who have marginally missed top ranked cadre like administration or police and destined to BCS education cadre. They repeatedly keep applying for next consecutive BCS exams in intention to avail their preferred cadre and retire from this effort only when age expires. In teaching service, they prefer to introduce them as first class government officer rather than teacher. This attitude is a major obstacle to sit before table for teaching and separate it from other clerical jobs.
When they start making adjustment in teaching profession some obvious push factors distract them from academic activities. The foremost factor is promotion structure; it does not follow academic excellence. Like other government jobs, here promotion mainly depends on availability of posts and length of services.
With shortage of teaching stuff, it is an absolutely Herculean task to take care of classes properly. In a six day class schedule a department having four batches for honors and one batch for masters must attend at least 20 classes a day allocating four classes for a batch.
It can no how be handled by a department with four teachers, on average. In result, total system of class schedule collapses to chaos. Some colleges are found to maintain a three day class schedule for a batch. Circumstances become so messy that no teacher has scope to finish syllabus with due importance or even can touch all topics of a syllabus.
Another important barrier is lack reading materials among influx of so called books available in market. For social work subject, say for example, students follow book-like something that is full of words with zero knowledge value. All is a result of a cut and paste effort. I see teachers themselves are following these books to teach in class and mark out questions important for exam. It is ironic that most of the marked out question directly appears in exam question. It was my utter surprise as a fresh teacher that students are never interested in the topic of discussion; they want to locate question and answer in my lecture. It is tough for a fresh one to maintain university standard in such a dilapidated academic environment. I hear from senior teachers that they themselves began teaching with academic zeal but it is national university environment that ended them in such a condition where there are exams after exams but produce no knowledge to contribute to the nation.
No one expect any miracle, but a targeted axe can grind the root of problem. Like the crush program of NU, though there are some demerits, it has successfully ended the decade long session jam. Awarding teachers with due academic environment, NU can easily maximize its resources wide coverage of affiliated colleges and millions of enrolled students.
The writer is Lecturer, Government Barisal College, Barisal
