Yesterday, the Ghana Teacher Prize, formerly known as the Best Teacher Award but repackaged in 2018, was held in Sunyani, the capital of the Bono Region.
The award is meant to motivate the Ghanaian teacher to do his or her best in the teaching and learning situation.
The event was on the theme: Teachers Wanted: Reclaiming Teaching and Learning for Human-centered Recovery.”
The Overall Best Teacher won a three-bedroom house, the first runner-up a double-cabin pickup and the second runner-up a saloon car, while 15 other teachers from the pre–school to the SHS and five non-teaching staff were also presented with various prizes for their hard work.
The Ghana Teacher Prize coincided with the marking of the World Teachers’ Day globally held on the theme ‘Teachers at the Heart of Education Recovery.’
The World Teachers Day, held every year on October, is a day set aside to commemorate the adoption of a joint UNESCO and ILO recommendation on the status of the teacher.
The recommendation, which was adopted in the year 1966, serves as an instrument that defines teachers’ professional responsibilities and rights to practise globally.
Definitely teachers must be celebrated and motivated because without them, the dissemination of knowledge in the formal way, particularly at the basic level of education, would be very difficult.
Teachers would have to help children to acquire the ability to read and write, as well as manipulate figures as the basic skills needed to climb up the education ladder to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills needed by everyone to be able compete anywhere on the globe.
The Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) has as a motto ‘If you can read this, thank a teacher.’
It is a lovely motto which captures the expectation that Ghanaian teachers would make the effort to ensure every child that enters basic school for at most three years must be able to read perfectly, except those who have certain conditions that do not permit them to do so.
For instance, some children suffer from Aphasia, which is the difficulty understanding or speaking parts of a language due to a brain injury or how the brain works; difficulty with forming specific words or making words or sentences flow smoothly; and slowness in learning.
However, it is the case in our dear country that compared to those who attend private schools, most children who attend public basic schools can neither read nor write simple sentences.
The truth is once a child does not have such skills, it would be difficult for him to go up the education ladder, hence some of our citizens have missed the development of their potential to the fullest.
The Ghanaian Times congratulates all teachers on their special day yesterday but appeals to the Ghanaian basic school teachers in particular to really lay the basic educational foundation for the Ghanaian child.
Elsewhere in the Scandinavia, children enter class one at age seven from kindergarten already reading. Think about it.
