▶ Your Answer :
Opinions vary regarding whether teachers
should be paid according to how much their students learn. As far as I am
concerned, I strongly believe teachers' salary should not be determined
according to their teaching ability for the following two reasons. First,
students cannot develop well in all aspects if their teachers get paid
according to students' performance. Second, students will not develop well even
in academic fields.
To
begin with, students would learn knowledge only related to exams if teachers'
salaries are decided depending on students' performance. To be specific, the
fundamental reason of getting a job is to make his or her living, and this is
no different when it comes to teachers. The more they earn, the more they will
be satisfied. However, ways to evaluate students' performances are mostly exams
which can only estimate their academic skills, which will force teachers to
think of effective ways to improve students' academic ability. This will lead
to the imbalance improvement of students' capability, mostly performing well in
academic fields but badly in their real life. For example, China is a country
that executes this policy. Teachers do their best to encourage students to do
well in exams. However, this leads to a serious social problem: students do not
know what to do after they graduated from high school. They hardly considered
their future when they were attending high school because they were only busy
preparing for the upcoming exam. This phenomenon indicates that students can be
affected negatively if teachers are paid according to how much their students
learn.
Secondly, students will learn less in classes. Being paid 'differently'
means every teacher gets different payment for their work. Therefore, some
teachers can feel comparative deprivation if they earn less, which can lead to
excessive competition between teachers. Under this kind of pressure, teachers
tend to be stricter in classes to let students learn as much as possible.
However, for students especially in adolescence, they are likely to have
antipathy to the style their teachers teach because adolescent students do not
like to be in the control of someone. They will not concentrate on classes and
will not listen to teachers, which will make them learn less in classes. For
example, Chinese teachers are one of the strictest teachers all over the world.
In contrast, Chinese students do not have the best ability among students all
over the world. This shows that if teachers are paid differently according to
how much their students learn, it does not mean students will learn more in
classes. Therefore, it is unnecessary to execute such kind of policy, which
will only increase the stress that teachers get.
To sum up, I am
not in favor of the idea that teachers should be paid according to how much
their students learn because students will develop neither academic skills nor
social skills in school. Developing students' ability should be a school's
priority but executing such kind of policy will certainly not do the job. (497
words) |