16 NEW VISION, Thursday, July 10, 2014

FEATURE

One foot in classroom, one

Inadequate scholastic
materials and meagre
pay force many
UPE teachers to
moonlight

1
PE 7

at
sl e

year

r U

Just like Carol Amoding in our story

yesterday, Nicholas Olupots story
reflects how teachers are also combing
through a hazy path to keep the
Universal Primary Education dream
alive. Teachers are forced by the
high cost of living to moonlight at the
expense of their teaching duty because
of their meager pay. In the second part
of the series, Conan Businge, Stephen
Ssenkaaba, Jonathan Angura, Angel
Musinguzi and Caroline Ariba focus on
teachers through Olupots experience.
Olupots
children
do chores
at home
as he
looks on
Photos
by Abou
Kisige

By Stephen Ssenkaaba
The morning haze hangs heavy over the
rusty roof before settling on the green grass
carpet at Bishops West Primary School in
Mukono district.
From out of one of the rooms on the
extreme left of the classroom block that
overlooks the expansive school compound,
emerges a tall and lean man. He is wearing
a cream T-shirt, brown fraying trousers
and simple black leather shoes.
Nicholas Olupot is a Social Studies (SST)
and Religious Education (R.E) teacher in
this school. He teaches P6 and P7. He also
is the Director of Studies and everyone at
the school, perhaps for convenience, now
fondly calls him DOS- as if it were part of
his official name.
Olupot, like thousands of other teachers
under the Universal Primary Education
(UPE) programme all over the country, is
faced with numerous challenges.
It is almost 17 years since the muchneeded programme started in Uganda.
Parents who had lost hope of ever sending
their children to school were relieved of
the burden of paying fees and excitedly
started sending their children to school by
the millions.
Today, however, these schools are facing
a myriad of difficulties: classes flooded with
pupils, poorly paid teachers overwhelmed
and often absent, inadequate scholastic
materials and infrastructure and a collapsed
inspection and monitoring system.
The
Governments
promise
of
free education seems to have been
misunderstood by parents and the financial
burden of funding the programme has
become a huge weight.
UNFORGIVING ROUTINE
Olupot comes in office at 6:00am. At
7:00am he goes out to monitor the arrival
of pupils and teachers. Teachers and
pupils are expected to be here by 7:00 am.
Anyone who comes after that is considered
late.
Olupot will soon set the class activities
rolling; churning out scholastic materials
to teachers from his office. He will then
prepare to take on his class the P7 SST
lesson.
As he paces up and down the verandah

FAMILY MAN

Olupot takes care of four children two biological

daughters and two dependents. On top of meeting
their physical needs he monitors their school work.

FOOD MATTERS

The teachers at Bishops West Primary School are

fortunate to be provided with lunch of posho and
beans prepared in the school kitchen.

I have seven SST

text books,which I
have to distribute
among the 69 pupils
in my class.
making sure that all is in place, this father
of two pre-pubescent girls looks dutiful.
However, his thin face, large bulging eyes
with browned whites and thin scattered
stubble tell a different story. They tell a
story of a struggling teacher.
The pupils in this school, like in other
UPE schools, do not pay school fees; the
school relies entirely on the Government
from scholastic materials to salaries.
Because these materials are often in short
supply and usually delayed, teachers like
Olupot go about their work with very
little at their disposal. This makes their
daily work, as I found out when I recently
spent a day observing how Olupot goes
about his work, very difficult and stressful.
Olupot sits in a sparsely furnished
dimly-lit room with a dead typewriter
and two plastic chairs for his visitors.
His office, which is supposed to keep
scholastic materials barely has any
chalk, teaching aids and other necessary
materials. I wonder what he gives out to
the teachers every morning. I distribute
whatever little we have of the books,
markers, charts, he says.
Olupot goes to class as often as is
possible. However, the inadequate supply
of scholastic materials often frustrates his

work. I have seven SST textbooks, which

I have to distribute among the 69 pupils in
my class, he says.
Because of the difficulty in distributing
these textbooks, he divides up his class
into groups so that each group crowds
around one textbook during lessons.
He does the same with the wall charts;
another crucial but scarce scholastic
material in the school. There are only
two of them. So I hang them up, on the
classroom wall and ask the pupils to refer
to them after class, he says. For other
needed but unavailable instruments like
barometers, we use diagrams to illustrate
their functionality, Olupot says.
NO TEACHING AIDS
His fellow teachers fair no better. Each one
of them has improved ways to cope with
the scarcity of resources to teach.
A distance away from Olupots class,
for example, Veronica Matinyi, is busy
attending to her class. With a piece of paper
in her hand, she tries to demonstrate a
concept. One group of her pupils clamour
for her attention, struggling to see what is
on the paper.
She ought to have some instructional
materials, but there is hardly any for her
hungry pupils. It is survival for the fittest
here as those nearer to her get better
access.
What do you do? She rhetorically asks
when I ask how she copes.
Matinyis situation is made even trickier
by the fact that a good number of her
pupils have different special needs some
are hard of hearing, others have cognitive
problems and a few are slow learners.
Without the facilities to cater for these
different challenges, she relies on the only
tool in her bag: her wits.
She smiles at her pupils as she explains
concepts even when she has to explain the