I REFER to last Wednesday's article, 'Throw the hiring net wide'. I agree that great teachers need not come with 'grand' certification or degrees. After all, if one cannot 'teach', all these are equivalent to nought. Excellent teachers can not only ignite their students' enthusiasm for a subject by helping them make sense of the concepts involved, but are also real-life examples of good values and attitudes and they impart these to their students by their actions.

It is therefore good that the Ministry of Education (MOE) is casting the hiring net for teachers wider. However, parents may worry about the quality of teaching their children will be exposed to in school while these aspiring teachers are tried out. Three months to a year is a long time and if the candidate is found to be unsuitable (in fact, experts say only one candidate in four turns out to be a good teacher), the damage done to the students may be too great to repair.

Also, with such a scheme in place, will schools be forced to accept these untrained 'teachers' sent by MOE instead of hiring experienced former or retired teachers when temporary vacancies arise? When my niece's Chinese teacher went on medical leave for a couple of days recently, the young relief teacher sent to cover her duties had difficulty with Chinese. She switched to English when she could not make herself clear. In the end, she just made the students copy the answers to an exercise she was provided with.

Luckily, it was only for a couple of days.

I hope our children, especially those in graduating classes, will not be deprived of a good and consistent standard of teaching.

In this economic downturn, one can understand why government departments, including MOE, will try to employ more people. However, teaching applicants should be trained first. If they want to see if teaching is really for them, let them 'shadow' a teacher for a certain period. If they do some real teaching, it should not be for longer than two months, even though they may be less expensive than relief teachers who are MOE-trained and have more experience.

Constance Lee (Ms)

This article was first published in The Straits Times.