Last week thursday was the first time I went for an interview as I just completed my National Youth Service Corp program popularly known as the NYSC and i wanted to get busy as soon as possible.
Although i do not having any experience teaching in a classroom setting, but only with just private tutoring. I decided to check out the school since it would provide me with a bit of experience in a professional setting.
Ordinarily i used to do a kind of internship at Computer village in Ikeja where you can get phones, computers and other related accessories. If you're a Nigerian and have ever been to computer village you'll know there's an almost non-existent professional setting to the market. So experience was the major motivating factor that made me not go back to my old place of work immediately I rounded up NYSC.
Fast forward to last thursday when I went for the interview and although i have good human relations skills, this would be on a different setting since i had no experience with classroom management.
I got there all dressed up and a little bit nervous but at the end i believe the interview went well. Then i was required to do a sort of micro teaching where i would teach a selected number of students while some other teachers would give a feedback on my teaching abilities to the school Principal.
In all that went well too as the Principal made me know later on that the only improvement should be on my audibility as students had to hear you to understand what you were teaching.
Then came perhaps the most important reason we all work apart from the love of the job. THE SALARY. I didn't have an idea how much teachers make but i put in the factors i was aware of to make my decision.
First was that i had good Intel that the school needed a teacher urgently. Even though i didn't have the experience they wanted to employ me, so it meant they needed me more and that would work in my favor.
Secondly, if you're a Nigerian you'll know that most schools manage whatever space they can get. But looking at the school environment and building it looked like it was in a good setting Nigerian wise.
And lastly student population can also give you an idea on how much salary a teacher might earn in that school and believe me they had a good number of students.
And since the minimum wage was supposed to be around 30 thousand naira. As a graduate I decided to go for nothing less than 40 thousand naira.
I was surprised when I was told the offer was for 20 thousand naira, and although the school was about to increase salaries, if my name was added to the list the highest they could go was 25 thousand naira.
I understood at that point the frustration I see on a lot of Nigerian teachers. A bag of rice should be within the range of 25 - 30 thousand naira. Meaning if I took the offer and removed my feeding and transport expenses from it, I would be earning less than what it would take to even buy a bag or rice.
I had to decline the offer but i understood the frustration we see everyday. People earning very little to solve very big problems. And although the government is doing next to nothing to provide jobs for Nigerians, i remembered my boss when I was at Computer village always told me that it was better to look inward and find something you can do for yourself.
If a better offer comes up next I'll take it but for now I think I'll stick to learning crypto Trading since i already have the basic idea and I might go back to my old job which actually pays more.
