New Deal....

A total of 924 school heads have been shortlisted to receive the "New Deals' cash incentives promised under the Government Transformation Programme (GTP). And how much would these heads be getting??? Well, RM7500. Additionally 5% of the top teachers from these schools who have improved beyond expectations will receive RM1800 while the rest will get RM900 each.

I think this it's all skewed. Why reward the Principals more? It's the teachers who do all the hard work. The cash incentives should be the same... it takes a team to improve a school. After all, Principals only teach 5 periods a week. They spend a lot of their time attending meetings. And very often they take the easiest class or subjects to teach! Many of them are lousy teachers themselves. Also, in many schools Principals teach on paper only cos they get other teachers to go into their classes.

What this New Deal is going to do is many Principals will chase the teachers for paperwork while they sit in their air-conditioned offices (some with personal attached bathrooms). It's hard to see a HM walking round the school all the time checking on classes on a really regular basis..... you might see them once in a while but the walks around the school seem to tire them or give them knee pains. There'll be more forms to fill for sure, more meetings to hold so that there'll be more record of work done, more show of everything so that effort is seen.

New Deals... somehow every programme hatched with noble intentions inadvertently saddle us with more paperwork and bog us down...... teaching is not made up of people with noble hearts even though it is a noble profession.