Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: The best insight, instant feedback, accountability. The all new Talk Radio Freedom 106.5.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Let's switch gears right now and chat with Brandon Roberts, Tutor Tobago Officer. Good morning to you, Brandon.
[00:00:16] Speaker A: Good morning to you and to the entire family.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: All right, thank you so much for joining us this morning. It's a big day out there in Tobago. Very pivotal moments taking place right now as it relates to this election.
Let's talk a bit about what has been happening under the stewardship of Farley Augustine previously leading up to election as it relates to education on the island.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: Well, it was a bit of excitement when we got three persons who very familiar with education getting into the assembly. That is the Chief Secretary being a former teacher, the Secretary of Education being a former teacher, the advisor or the technical officer to the secretary being a former teacher.
And you know, there was much expectation that, you know, understanding the classroom, understanding the issues, you know, they were just there, they would know the things that they would need to definitely address.
What we realize is that what we are getting today is more politicians and less of servers, persons who are actually coming to address issues and we are seeing it in national government as well.
Persons would see all the things that they need to say to get into power when they get into power, as if they forget all the things that they used to complain about before they get into power.
So there are several outstanding issues that I'm very displeased that they have not dealt with.
Both the Chief Secretary and the Secretary of Education were former contract teachers and it's amazing they have showed little to no care with fixing the contract teachers situation.
What we have in Tobago is we have not regularized our system since we added additional schools and some schools built up from three year schools to five years, even seven year schools and some move from five year to seven year schools.
However, the requisite number of teachers need to be increased through cabinet. What Tobago did is they implemented the contract teachers while they were supposed to work on that. That was since 20, 19, 98, 99, 2000, that era.
And they have complained bitterly about it while they were contract teachers and they have done nothing thus far.
What you get in the media is the political submissions about collaborations and audits and all those things, but nothing tangible. For four years as a Tobago officer I have been the one fighting them, which they should be willingly working with me to address that particular matter.
So I'm quite disappointed with that.
However they speak well, they speak well. If you don't know the issues and you listen to them speak, you believe that A lot is being done that they have education at heart.
We are in good hands.
But if you look at the tangibles, if persons who understand the system look at the tangibles, they have not served that education division well at all. But as we say, politicians know how to speak and what they are good politicians.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: So you're telling us, you're saying to me this morning that all of these persons that got into office are decision makers, persons that was able to really do some betterment for the country have abandoned their cause for that of political gain or political expediency. Not even that, I want to say for political popularity.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: Well, and it is the National Court, you know, and actually they're talking about CORE now. Persons try to secure our next four years or next five years.
So what they want to ensure is that the people believe that they're working some of the wood that needs to go in. You would see the fruit in some years to come. There are some low hanging fruits that you could do it right away. But our politicians of today cannot. Well, they see themselves as cannot.
They cannot afford to do things that would take long to bear fruit. So they would do the short term stuff, give out some hampers, talk about things that aren't really things to have people believe that they were kids.
[00:04:40] Speaker B: How have not cutting you across it, but how have tutor engaged with the Chief Sec?
Well, he's up for elections today. But how in previous, within previous months and maybe years, how did you all, what sort of work, infrastructure did you all put down? What groundwork did you all do? What engagements did you have with the THS sector? Bring him back to reality because as he mentioned, he was a former teacher. So come back down from there now. You know what sort of engagement and what was your reception like?
Right?
[00:05:05] Speaker A: So I really love your question. I have never met the Chief Secretary on education matters. I have written the Chief Secretary on numerous occasions. Not once was their response.
On all occasions. I've got confirmations that he got the. The letter. So one, there was one occasion where I wrote both the Secretary and the Chief Secretary and she responded indicating that the Chief Secretary is away and they would arrange a meeting. And so the meeting never came, but he never responded. I have never, as I said before, I have never, after all the times I've written the Chief Secretary never been able to meet with him. Who I have been able to meet with is the Secretary of Education and she would come with all the promises as soon. As I said before, where the contractual situation is concerned, the groundwork, what I did as Tobago officer I went to Trinidad, get some sample schools, the student population, the teacher population to help justify why we need to increase our population, our teaching population in Tobago. I did advantages and disadvantages of the current system and I did a report and presented it to them.
What they did, they said that they commended me for the information and they said they were going to do an audit.
And after that we've been audit after audit. So the first audit they invited me to a meeting. Apparently I was the only person who read the audit. So when I started to talk about the audit I had to explain to them a Pagerman what I mean by this particular question, why the information and then they went and do another audit and that audit now is by the Ministry of Education who has no role to play with the tha division of Education where that is concerned. We have not yet seen that audit. So what you get is the presentation of work being done. It's not so much work they're saying to the population things that they're doing, but there are things.
When we went to do the checks in Trinidad schools that are smaller than schools in Tobago have more teachers.
Now if we tell the contract teachers to stay home, don't come out to school, schools won't function.
So it's self explanatory that we need to adjust our system.
What thesis are major research and major audits after audits that they're working on to make a case to cabinet to increase our establishment of the requisite needs And I don't know, I don't know what they claim to be working on.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: Let me ask you something as we look at some of these things and you mentioned teacher shortage that is something that we also have here in Trinidad. But you said something very startling. You said at a smaller school they seem to have more teachers.
Were you able to bring this to the attention of the education officer of the the.
[00:07:51] Speaker A: Yes. So I said before I, I created what I did, I created a spreadsheet.
So there were about six or seven schools I took as samples in Trinidad, some big schools, some small schools and I compared those with the schools that we have with eight schools we have in Tobago and I showed the disparity in terms of. Because in secondary schools you are looking at subject areas and not so much the amount of students in a class.
So if you look at the amount of students in a class they may say we don't need the teachers but we have a teacher to teach math. The math teacher don't teach all the other subject areas so you need to have subject teachers requisite to the needs. So I did all of that. I looked at it by department and I prepared as I said, a package that I presented to them which they commended me for. But I don't ever go to the division meetings empty handed. I go with stuff because we are going to collaborate. I'm not going to call on them to do things and I'm doing nothing. So each time I have meetings with the secretary I have issues with suggested solutions.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: Has Tutor ever embarked on anybody, let's say from counterparts in Trinidad to try to at least get an audience with Farley using some kind of, you know, we're in Trinidad and Tobago, we like links, you know, we always have somebody we know that can really get that information across them. So we can have that ambush meeting if you want to call it that.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: Well no, we really THA functions different to the central government.
So in terms of having someone, I don't know who in Trinidad would be able to have that greater power to call the Chief Secretary meeting. The Chief Secretary is responsible for Tobago matters. So I am well placed as Tobago officer to request an audience.
Unfortunately it's the common trend where we are a lot of persons have asked to meet with him and we have not been able to have such a.
[00:09:45] Speaker B: Meeting as your election wish list.
I'm not asking you what political party you would like to see at the helm of the tha but whoever gets into the office, whether it be Farley retaining his seat or other or another person, what is the Education tutors wish list for education going forward in Tobago and how do you plan on achieving this?
[00:10:09] Speaker A: Right, and I like how you phrase the question and you're not asking which party I'll support but I could respond to that. Of course it's not a party thing, you know, it's the politics of today.
So whichever party, the politicians we have of today are great politicians.
We had a change of government recently.
I believe our previous minister was a great politician too.
We have persons have voted on governments because they have not been satisfied. So it's not a party thing at all. What we need to have is when we go to the poll and we stain our fingers, the persons who are jumping up in each case within green jersey and red jersey and yellow jersey, they when they go in there they work.
But you know we support these persons whether they work or not. So where to answer that question where education is concerned, the package of education does not meet the needs of our students. That's why you have a group of persons who would excel and a Majority who would not do so well and you are seeing it in the crime rate. So the purpose of education is to promote fitting citizens. If we are having such a high crime rate, a high delinquency rate in terms of persons leaving schools without a certificate, then the education system is not meeting the needs.
So the packaging needs to be changed. So those students who we say are autistic, they have special skills. We're just not able to meet it with our basic talk and talk or our teacher centered curriculum. We package things to them and if they can't meet it, then we fail them.
We don't have the resources to have a true student centered teaching.
So autistic students may need more hands on stuff or they need the devices. And as I mentioned, devices a key example of politicians, we throw devices into the schools. When schools don't have the infrastructure with Internet and the labs, the computer labs don't have functioning stuff. So what's the purpose of the laptops though? To make sure each home has a device that they could go onto the Internet with to do research. What's the purpose of the laptop? Because we need to maximize on our limited resources.
So I would want that our packaging for education be able to meet the needs of our students and not meet the needs of a particular thesis that persons will come up with. So the infrastructure layout should meet the needs of those students. So I have proposed to the division several times, even in ministry several times. We need to have a thematic approach to teaching. So what we do is we teach raw content but we don't teach it on a particular topic. We don't align it to anything.
Students in Tobago may more be in tune to fishing, sports, tourism. When you're teaching the maths, don't pull these foreign examples of John Brown and something pick examples of the tourism. So if they attend bus and a cruise ship comes in, how many persons they can take and use those examples. So when you're teaching you must. They're learning about tourism. One time when you're doing sports, in sports, like for in football, when you're warming up, getting groups of five, getting groups of 10, that's multiplication.
So use some of the sporting activities as examples in your teaching.
The math teacher in today's teaching focus purely on maths. But if the math teacher ensures that the sentence structure in the teaching is correct, you're also helping them to practice the English. But we don't have that kind of education in Trinidad and Tobago. What we have is the math teacher teaching maths during maths time.
And the social studies teacher teaching social studies during social stuff and there's no correlation. So when I leave the math class, I've done it math for the day when there are so many examples of maths that you could incorporate in all the other subject areas.
Reading, they're not doing well with reading.
I would admit several teachers don't know how to teach reading. People believe reading is just taking a book and read a paragraph or read a passage. There are many dynamics to reading. Your vocabulary, your comprehension, your creative writing are all tied to reading. But spelling is different to vocabulary because it gives you 20 words to go home and learn. And once you come back and spell it, you're good. But your spelling words should be explored as to the synonyms of these words, the antonyms of these words. How could you use the word in a sentence?
Your spelling words should be encouraged in a particular topic for creative writing. So you're practicing the word. But we have segmented teaching so you give randomly 20 words to go home and learn and you come back once you spell it are good.
So our packaging of education needs to be addressed. So.
[00:14:58] Speaker B: So you are looking at a holistic overview of the syllabus in its entirety. Because we would have seen the Ministry of Education, especially on a CIT level, when you look at secondary schools, coming from the examination council providing this syllabus as to what needs to be taught at these schools. Because this is what we're going to examine you on. You know, and I love the fact that you want to include local things in the math as opposed to John have five mangoes or five apples and he sell how much more apples he has. As opposed to saying we have 10 buses and one cruise ship carrying 1500 people. How many persons can take on a bus that carries 25 per load? You know, and you're teaching addition, multiplication, subtraction, division, basic arithmetic and that gets you through.
Outside of that, you are talking about an entire systematic change of the syllabus. If you are to step out of the realm of just the tha, that is something you have to tap into with central government.
Is it that? Because I don't think Tobago is isolated in their teachings syllabus away from, from the, from the cg. So the thing about it is you would have to partner up now with the president of Tutor in Trinidad and work this thing through. But that's a very, very good idea. I want to know on your wish list, how are you even going to get that conversation rolling with the tha before you can rule it out in a Nationalistic level.
[00:16:26] Speaker A: Right. So it's not so much. So it's not so much. You have to have an overhaul of the curriculum at all. You know, it's a flavor to the curriculum so the topics remain the same, but how you teach the topics is what you're going to change.
Now, some persons are not able to change how they teach the topic because the resources aren't there. If you want more hands on things, it's the same topics, not a different curriculum at all. It's the same topics. If you want more hands or you need more tangible things, need the resources. If currently, no, our teachers are spending out of pocket to provide resources to our schools, how much could they actually do? So the resources are why, I believe nationally, because we have had this conversion with the former Minister of Education as well. I believe nationally, while it has not taken off, it requires resources. We have been talking about online education. We cannot move to online education because of resources.
Teachers need resources, the school need resources. How many smart boards schools have? So we're talking about going online. Online how?
When they add resources, what they hope is that teachers would buy their laptops and teachers would bring their projectors and teachers will get all the stuff that the schools need and we just go online whenever there's a disaster or something. But that's not how it's supposed to work. And in terms of the audience, we presented this to the secretary already and she came up with this Tobago centric curriculum that she spoke about for four years. She even lied at one point in time that they did a pilot, which was not the case at all. So there has not been any presentation of what this Tobago century curriculum is going to be. I don't think she understood what we meant by the thematic approach. They were actually building out a new curriculum, which you cannot do when we're doing one exam.
[00:18:10] Speaker B: That's the point. And that's when I alluded to cxc.
It's one exam, you know, and I like the fact that you're using it as a flavor. But to add, because for me, I being honest with you, I often wonder what Triggs is going to do for me, what algebra was going to do for me. But I had to do it right.
I don't use trigonometry today, but maybe I do. I don't know, I'm not in that field, you know, as a matter of fact, what I do for a living today, if I had to follow what I was studying in school, I would not be here this morning, you know, I would have probably been a very, very good draftsman, I would tell you that. All right, so let's take a quick call with respect and see who's on the line. Hello, good morning, who wants to talk to us?
All right, 625-2257. You can get a chance to call in very quick and chat with Brandon if you have a concern. So as we continue down your wish list. Ah, here's the call. Hello, good morning.
[00:18:57] Speaker C: A pleasant good morning, Davy, and a pleasant good morning to your guest or your interviewee if I'm to speak. Yeah, Davy, you may disagree with me, but I feel part of the conversation actually said that the current regime in Tobago has not performed well. And I think on election day it's a bit dangerous to raise those issues. If it is that the interviewee can just add to it to show that he is non political, not politically biased and not in the campaign mood. I think it will go a long way. I thank you. Enjoy.
[00:19:36] Speaker B: All right, thank you very much for pointing that out. So as we continue down the wish list now, outside of what you have mentioned so far, we what are some of the reachable things that you think? Because I like to believe in reachable goals, things that you know, we want to get this to be the ultimate. So you're running the 100k race or the 50k race, but you're counting every five kilometers that you run, celebrate that eventually with lead up. So in the short term interim, whoever takes the helm of the tha by six or by tonight, what is a very reachable solution or wish list that you have a few things that you think in the short term, maybe the within the next year we can achieve this.
[00:20:15] Speaker A: If I answer the question, I would just want to remind the listener and in terms of the concern I did indicate is not so much of a party.
[00:20:22] Speaker B: True.
[00:20:22] Speaker A: Because we have had changes in the government.
[00:20:24] Speaker B: True, true.
[00:20:26] Speaker A: The style of politics didn't change overnight.
So I did make that clear, I believe. But I understand the concern of the caller and that's why I've been cautious in the things that I see. But it's not a party thing. It has been the politics of some time that we have more politicians than actual workers.
In terms of the short term, well, we have to work on our infrastructure of our schools. So a lot of our schools, like for example our labs, our labs don't have schools.
Most of our labs are not functional. So some schools go to other schools to use their labs.
We need to ensure that the place that we are asking students to come and learn are fit for learning that is short term. Now it may come across the persons that are expensive thinking of ageing schools but there's a partnership with stakeholders. So a lot of stakeholders want to assist but how can they assist?
There are a lot of schools who want to get things done but they will need the approval of the division to have outside person. For example putting an AC in a particular school. If you are going to break the wall areas to install the ac, that's something that you need to get the permission from the division for and for continuous maintenance. The division must ensure that this is what is happening at this school so that if any maintenance is to come to the division they are aware of it. So consultation with stakeholders who want assisting education system is important.
So the infrastructure must be built up. We must have had that built out. We need to ensure that there's parity between principals, supervisors, curriculum officers. So they'll be looking at low cost things.
But principals function as principals, supervisors, functional supervisors and curriculum officers function as curriculum officers. There isn't that unity, you know. So curriculum officers will come to our school simply to do curriculum officers thing. They are not so much in tune with what supervisors are doing and none of them are in tune with what principals have to deal with in a particular school on a daily basis. So we need to have a more in sync education system and that does not require major financial investments.
If we have all of a common goal, that's how we could start. So we need a secretary with that vision, with that vision of here is where we're going, you these various stakeholders, this is how you fit where we are going and ensure that whatever resources that can be applied to these particular groupings to ensure that they meet the targets that we are setting based on our vision that those are the short term things that need to happen. Because right now education system is very much segmented. Everybody does do their part at their time. It's like kfc, you know, one person flower, one person, one person sees the one person.
So we need to have a most in sync where all persons understand when they don't do their part. So for the teachers who are not carrying that flag well when they don't do their part, what is the impact?
[00:23:30] Speaker B: Brandon, I want to thank you. I have to leave it there as we are moving faster pace with this coverage of Tobago elections and I have news coming up at the top and some of the commitments so I thank you very much. Brandon Roberts from Tutor Tobago Officer officers to chat with me on that wish list that you would look forward to in the upcoming years following today's outcome of the tha elections. Have a good day and be safe out there, Brandon, and we'll talk soon. Waiting for when it finish and it's all said and done. Let's revisit this conversation and see how that wish list can commence.
[00:23:59] Speaker A: Yeah, no problem. And thanks for having me on your program.
[00:24:02] Speaker B: You're welcome, buddy.
[00:24:03] Speaker A: The best insight, instant feedback, accountability the all new Talk Radio Freedom 106.5.
