Citizens Voice

The Teachers Eligibility Test initiated by the National Council of Teachers Education is only a change in the current procedure to judge the eligibility of a candidate aspiring to be a teacher from Classes I-VIII.

Written by Express News Service

July 26, 2011 03:48 AM IST

4 min read

Teacher recruitment

The Teachers Eligibility Test (TET) initiated by the National Council of Teachers Education (NCET) is only a change in the current procedure to judge the eligibility of a candidate aspiring to be a teacher from Classes I-VIII. The school may be a central government school,a state government school or a school under the administrative control of UT of Chandigarh and Andaman & Nicobar Islands; the school may be a government school or a private school; the school may be an aided school or an unaided school. TET is mandatory as the RTE Act,2009,mandates improvement in quality of education. Now unlike other professional degrees,B.Ed. alone is not enough for a candidate to acquire the title of a teacher. Pressure was put on working teachers also. Though they need not appear for TET,they must acquire the adequate degree within five years to ensure their jobs. Teaching has become a challenging job under these circumstances.

The target of appointing approximately 5.1 lakh additional teachers in1.29 million elementary schools in the next three years in the country to bring down student teacher ratio to 30:1 may suffer high crisis of teachers. Already Assam,Jharkhand,Bengal,Chhattisgarh,UP,Orissa and Bihar are facing a huge teacher deficit. TET results first declared by Gujarat shows only 27.57 pass percentage with minimum 60 per cent marks. Question papers in CTET conducted by CBSE on June 26,was unnecessarily tough with lengthy questions which were irrelevant to subject and syllabus prescribed for the elementary level and the candidates suffered tremendous time shortage to answer them. One can easily get muddled with tricky questions and think that he is on the wrong part away from language. Our countrys evaluation system always tests and concludes with that what the examinee does not know,rather than what he knows and whether that is enough to perform his job successfully added to his enthusiasm and dedication.

Its now the time for criticism,that dragging the point from the main features of (RTE) Act,unfortunately and suddenly TET has become the lock of paramount importance which must be opened at any cost by the candidates aspiring for the job of teaching. Their duties are specified but no attempt to bring uniformity in their remunerations is made or their financial instability is taken care of. Its probably because teaching is a devotion of teachers to their duties as Gandhiji told,its the devotion of teachers to the students and to God. In my teaching life I attended a number of workshops and seminars. Even in the workshop organized by NCERT,DELHI,I was encouraged to devote my life without exhibiting any materialistic attitude. I could not criticise this encouragement as it ultimately targeted to the welfare of students. The central and state government school teachers get salary as per government norms. But the teachers working in private schools are not so lucky.

Banani Sikdar,Vishrantwadi

BRTS plan loopholes

The PCMC is planning to start BRTS and has given the permission to built the new bus stops,but there are some negative aspects which I would like to point out to the authorities concerned:

*The pedestrians are finding it tough to cross the road owing to the heavy traffic on the highway. BRTS will compound the situation.

Children and seniors will be troubled

*If accidents occur,who will be accountable?

*Around 18 bus stops will be set up by PCMC. Instead of creating the new bus stops,why can’t we give the BRT the place where already the old buses are stopping. We can also modify the old bus stops and make the swanky

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*It can be easier for the public to identify the old bus stop instead of creating the new ones and wasting the money for the development of new bus stops. Therefore,it the requested that the development of new bus stops should be stopped. The PCMC should think twice in the interest of the citizens.

Advocate Sagar Charan,Pimpri