According to The Annual School survey of 2016, Uganda has over 30,000 Pre-Elementary, Elementary, and Secondary School Institutions with 15 Million learners and over 260,000 School teachers.

Part-Time Job

A Part-time Job is the kind of job that carries fewer hours a week than a full-time job. People
who do part-time Jobs work in shifts and this is the case with many Secondary School teachers in Uganda today. They work Part-time, Roaming from School to school in pursuit of better pay and good working conditions. But how exactly does Part-Time Teaching work in a typical Ugandan Secondary School?

First, One must look for a school where to teach. The terms are that you may work either
two or three full days in a week, or one might teach Half a day/Days, depending on the
contract with that school. On average Secondary Schools in Kampala pay Somewhere between Thirty thousand Shillings to Forty Thousand Shillings each day that you teach. If one teaches two days a week, it means they work eight days a month, hence earning Two hundred  Forty Thousand Shillings or Three hundred and Twenty thousand a month. If it is three days a week, do the Maths for that. This is very little money for a professional. At first, you may
think that you’re doing less work and earning more, but in the long run, the school exploits you because, by the close of the term, you are expected to cover workload as though you were a full-time teacher and a little pay!

So, What exactly drives teachers and School Directors to accept the arrangement of Part-time Teaching?

Teachers Teach Part-time because they need to earn more money. For a teacher in Uganda, teaching pays very little money and so teachers have to look out for other schools to supplement their Salaries.

TeachersworkParttimebecausetheyWanttoearnmoreopportunities.For example, teachers might feel cheated in one school where they have taught for many years without any promotion and so they may decide to add another school where they feel they might be given an office, Department, and more Allowances.

School owners prefer to use Part-Time teachers because they are relatively cheaper to pay than Full-time teachers. A School Director will pay a Part-time teacher half or even Quater the salary he would pay to a Full-time teacher. This helps them save money and make more profits.

In cases where there are overqualified or highly experienced teachers, School Directors are forced to employ them on a Part-time basis because they are too expensive to maintain. For example, if a Masters’s Degree holder is teaching in Secondary School, they usually Charge lots of money and so can only be maintained on a part-time basis.

Due to the constant meager Salaries for teachers, many of them have decided to delve into other businesses or jobs to supplement the peanuts that they earn as teachers. Therefore it is common to see a teacher working as a Radio/Televisions how host, or selling in a shop or in worse Scenarios Up-country Riding Boda Boda. They divide their time between teaching and private business. Hence Part-time teaching increases.

Teaching Part-time is good but marred with so many disadvantages which include lack: law
off of efficiency on the teacher’s side. If a teacher teaches in say four schools, it is close to impossible that he will be efficient on the job in all those schools. This is because of the distance between schools, leading to late coming and so efficiency becomes a wild dream.

There is a huge workload for teachers in every school that they teach. In Uganda, we already have so many students and few teachers and so teachers have to mark any scripts, record results, and beat deadlines. This overwhelms them and they resort to forging marks, leading to the promotion of” halfbaked” Students.

Part-time teaching came with the employment of unqualified teachers and school dropouts in some cases because they are cheaper to pay and can teach for more hours as opposed to qualified teachers.

Teachers get lots of fatigue. Stories have been told of teachers who teach in three schools in a single day! And yet they are far apart from themselves. A teacher will teach in a school in Wakiso in the morning, then head to Kyengera in the noon, then close the day at a school in Kajjansi. Most of the time Is spent on the way and by the time they reach school, they are already exhausted.

Part-time teaching also doesn’t pay much and so the teacher will give Priority to the school that pays much a day so the one that pays them less will receive the least lessons. We can all imagine the loss on the side of the students.

I feel like, during Part-time teaching, there is little time spent with learners in each school one teaches, and more time is spent on the way as one roams from School to school in order to make an extra buck. Also because many schools are owned by Businessmen and women, who are only driven by profits, less care is put on the standard of education because the cheaper the teacher, the lesser money spent on Salaries, hence more profits.

Finally, as the Standard of teaching goes down, the students go down with it, and at times their future is in Jeopardy because with little study time, comes poor grades leading to weak courses at University and so an average job leading to an average lifestyle in future.

YouTubeat(MCSELVIC).

By Vincent Sserunkuma

A Professional teacher and Writer.

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