The Common Problems That Face Teachers in Tanzanian Schools

Government employed teachers, are those teachers who serves the government schools, either in primary or secondary schools. Their main duty is to teach and transferring knowledge, skills and culture to students or pupils in theses public schools. In the course of transferring knowledge to young generation they tend to face different challenges as explained below as follows:-

Lack of teaching and learning materials

• Many schools in Tanzania has no enough teaching and learning materials such as text books, teaching equipment, and other teaching materials. They hustle everyday searching for teaching materials in their environment including internet resources in order to get lesson notes. This is a greater challenge to teachers making them feel that teaching activity is a hard job.

Low salary paid to Teachers

• Government employed teachers are doing greater job transferring knowledge to the young generation but still they are paid little salary. This is great challenge to teachers and this make them even not concentrating on teaching because they just keep thinking about how to earn an extra cash for him or her to survive well. Because the paid salary is not enough to teachers monthly expenditure especially those who have big families. This challenge remove teachers concentration on teaching . I recommend the government to crosscheck payment system of teachers in order to make them feel as if they are real government servants by increasing their salary.

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Poor working environment

• Many government schools has no good favorable environment, that is you may find the school has no any office for teachers. Teachers are kept in an empty classroom and made it as their office. Another issue is the houses, many governmental built schools has no houses for teachers to live, this led to make teachers live far away from the school where by some areas are remoteness and they don’t have even electricity supply. This make teachers feel as if they are not civil servants. Therefore in order to resolve this problem the government should improve the working environment for its teachers.

Lack of teachers in rural areas

• Many government schools which are located at rural areas has low number of teachers while those urban schools have many teachers compared to urban schools. This is a great challenge to teachers who are in rural secondary schools, because you may find the school has a number of five hundred students and has only nine teachers. And some of subject may miss teachers especially science subject, you may find that mathematics teacher is one in a school with about five hundred students enrolled. This challenge make the teachers feel that teaching activity is tiresome job and difficult enough, because when it come the time you want to give the students test or exam, you start thinking on how are you going to mark all papers. Therefore in order to solve this problem the government has to crosscheck the schools with few teachers and hire or transfer more teachers to school with lack of teachers particularly in rural areas.

Challenges from the parents and guardians or civilians

• This means that some parents are they ignorant especially when they find out that his or her child is punished by teachers, some parents tend to claim teachers to for the case of punishing their children at school. Other parents or guardians they don’t want their children to be punished by teachers especially having punished by sticks, even if the student or pupils is misbehaving at school or broke out the schools regulations. Some tend to inter in conflicts with teachers and sometimes even bewitching the teachers. In order to resolve this problem parents and or guardians should not interfere the school regulations.

Lack of motivation to teachers by the Government

• Motivation is something important to any person , motivation make a person to work more accurate knowing that she or he will get something after accomplishing something in a good way. Teachers in many schools has no motivation from the governments, you will find out that instead of motivating teachers the government motivate the students, where by the teacher is one to be motivated after the students being performed well. Example is the previous years the government was giving money and laptops and money to the students who did well in their examination. It used to call them to the parliament house and giving them those gifts. The question is who is to be motivated? , The one who made the students to perform well or the students who performed well? The one who is to be motivated is the one who made the students to perform well but not the students. Therefore the government should crosscheck its services to workers including motivations so as to make them work hard.
  

Lack of cooperation between parents or guardians and teachers

• This means that parents or guardians think that only the teacher is responsible for her or his child to perform well in his or her academics, that is parents do not crosscheck their students’ progress academically instead they live everything to be done by teachers. You may find that parents or guardians they tend to leave their children playing the whole time, instead of keeping them busy studying, this problem is mainly common to public schools (day schools) where students go to school and return home. In order to solve this challenge parents must cooperate with teachers by making follow up of their children academic progress.