When I look at the way most schools have organised school programmes these days, I remember one thing: we never taught beyond the six hours the Ministry of Education in its entirety prescribes.
Teachers never suffered from what is called teaching overload. Teaching overload refers to teaching in excess of the prescribed actual classroom teaching in a day.
Then as now, the regulations prescribed that there shall be, in the secondary school system, nine lessons per day for five days totaling 45 lessons a week. And the total time allocation for each lesson shall be 45 minutes.
It is under these instructional hours that I had the privilege to teach students at Kolanya High School. If I remember correctly, from July 1989 to February 1990.
I remember, the longest instructional hours I had was on a Thursday. I had four lessons.
The four lessons meant that I spent a total of three hours of engagement with students before 3.30pm—the time official class or instructional hours ends, under the regulations that guided school hours.
I went home drained. I was then young, full of energy. But I became real weary every Thursday. The rest of the weekdays were, relatively speaking, light. I could cast my eyes around.
The curriculum-based establishment in Kenya requires every teacher in secondary school to teach a maximum of 28 lessons per week. There are other duties like preparing for lessons, marking assignments, (particularly for mathematics and language teachers), counselling students, attending departmental meetings and talking to parents. I have not said anything about taking part in co-curricular activities.
The amount of time during which students receive instruction from a classroom teacher in a school context on a weekly basis is 21 hours of teaching time, with each period being 45 minutes long.
Tolerable
This implied curriculum load is tolerable. This within the school hours is exhausting enough: lesson preparation, marking class assignments, counselling students outside instructional time, attending departmental meetings and talking to parents, to say nothing about taking part and co-curricular activities.
The nine lessons per day for five days totaling to 45 lessons per week is the norm. What I however, see is that schools have flagrantly departed from this norm and made the exception the norm.
Statutorily, the nine-hour lessons per day for five days totaling to 45 lessons per week is between 8am and 3.30pm. The man hours are enough to test the resilience of any teacher.
The 8am and 3.30pm instructional time should take time while norm, it is not cast in stone. Depending on the exigencies of the period, the school management can make allowances for a teacher or teachers to teach. Nevertheless, implicit in the stipulated class hours between 8am and 3.30pm, is that this is the period in which effective teaching and learning takes place—allowing rest time, reflection and leisure and sufficient sleep—for teachers and students alike.
A significant number of schools, however, have gone against the good sense implied in the Basic Regulations 2015, concerning school hours. The schools regularly hold instructional time at 7pm up to around 9.30pm. Broken into the 45 minutes per lesson, this amounts to an additional 4 lessons to the one education policy, standards and curricular stipulates. We haven’t talked about the period between 5am and 6am during which students are expected to be in classes—period when, in some schools, teaching is conducted. I don’t know. There must be serious cases of insomnia somewhere. In reality, teachers are made to teach for more than six hours, policy makers in education stipulate.
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Some Kenyans attribute this flagrant violation of the school hours to too much content that must be taught in a limited amount of time.
Giving heavy curriculum load as the basis for this, a Mr Peter Kaaga observed in response to a Facebook post: “Do you know that in top schools nowadays they don’t even have games? That PE (Physical Education) lessons have been allocated to Math lessons? That in fact, teaching goes up to 10pm and a resume at 4am, the only remedy is to rationalise the curriculum content time allocation.
The argument about allegedly weightier teaching load is a myth. It is on record that the Ministry of Education reviewed the initial 8.4.4 curriculum load to the current one. The review made the curriculum load to be substantially similar in weight as the defunct 7.4.2.3 system of education.
The time such a teaching, violative of the stipulated hours, would have been in the early days of the 8.4.4 system of education. This was when primary school and secondary learners sat for seven and 12 subjects in their KCPE and KCSE respectively.
But this is not the case. The strongest proof that the curriculum is not heavy as claimed can be gleaned from the remarks of some Principals whose school post excellent results in KCSE.
They say they finish the secondary school syllabus in the first term when the students are in Form Four. They spend the second term and third term revising and doing tests—to prepare the students for the KCSE.
Heavy cost
What they don’t tell Kenyans is that the results are attained at heavy cost to the teacher and the learner. Teachers and students hardly have enough sleep. Neither of them has sufficient time, for the teacher, to research and prepare for effective teaching and for the learner, to read not just the curriculum content on his or her own, but also to read extensively—beyond the textbooks.
This is hogwash to the school administration.
What they also don’t tell stakeholders is that the school has little concern with students who happen to have learning and behaviour difficulties. An otherwise well-established school cannot have fairly large students who otherwise joined secondary education with fairly good marks in KCPE getting Ds and below.
The third point not talked about is that the instructional hours outside the stipulated hours are underwritten by parents and guardians. That parents pay additional levies—variously called motivational or remedial fees—to conduct the instructional hours.
It is not unusual for schools to teach outside the stipulated hours. Educational jurisdictions across the world provide for it. The teaching beyond the hours allowed is what amounts to teaching overload. Not the version we have in Kenya.
Properly defined therefore, teaching overload refers to the actual classroom teaching in excess of the prescribed six hours of actual classroom teaching in a day. Very few teachers, if any, teach beyond the six hours the government designates under section 84 of Basic Education Regulations 2015.
Educational jurisdictions which allow this have imposed a caveat. Take the Philippines for Example. Authorities in education provide first that, the actual classroom teaching is in excess of the prescribed six hours of actual classroom teaching in a day. However, any teaching overload, which is teaching beyond the prescribed hours, shall not exceed two hours a day or ten hours a week.
The country never saw this oddity. I didn’t see it at Kolanya High School. I started seeing this oddity towards the end early 2000, long after the government had reviewed the curriculum to an appreciable load.
By Kennedy Buhere
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