Many people think using students to weed at the Basic school level is a form of punishment. But I think it's a form of teaching the students the right way how their lives should be modeled for better life in future.
I'm a Basic school teacher and have taught at the basic level for the past 12years now. There have been many instances where we as teachers and even the headteacher have encountered so many challenges with some of the community members about using students to weed the compound.Some people always think the negative way as being have some cut in the cause of weeding, biting by wild animals like snake or even being fallen sick due to the hotness of the Sun. If we think in this way, I can also say that in everything there is risk involved.
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However, one of the motive of giving students grounds weeding is to equip them to be self efficient and reliable. In future as they complete school and get job, they may live in their own apartment in case the surrounding is bushy there isn't need to hire a labourer. They can do it themselves. It's a way of teaching the students about cleanliness so that the students would be self controlled without anyone coming to order him or her to exercise his or her responsibilities.
So at the school certain, you would see a lot of activities that teachers supervise the students to carry out not weeding alone. Some of these are sweeping the classrooms, mopping the bathroom and cleaning the toilet and urinal. For something like sweeping is done always in the morning when school is in session. We monitor every student to do it before getting to their various classrooms for lessons to begin. Something like cleaning the bathroom, toilet and the urinal can be done for every 3 days, but in some boarding house it's done on daily basis.
We also have session leaders with their respective sessions that we have assigned portions of the compound for them to work. The members of each session work on their plots on daily basis. The session leaders go round to check prove of work such as picking all litters, weeding regularly and how well the plot has been kept cleaned for the whole including the neatness of the students and base on that award weekly marks. Any session who wins the overall good work is awarded some prizes. In that way, every member of each session would want to emerge the winner so there is always competition among the various session.
We are now in the raining seasons so the grass growth are always promoted by the frequent rainfall. I saw my school compound to be very weedy which doesn't speak well of us. Our structures aren't encouraging even not conducive for learning so if we allow the compound to grow with weeds, it makes our school very scurry. I therefore organized all my students for grounds weeding. I led the students to demarcate their portions to be weeded. For each student, I stretching my leg twice; about 2m interval and length is about 5m.
Students weeding on our compound
Since the portion given to them were not all that large, they didn't complain. I think is sound good to tidy up our compound when it's weedy and full of litters. We have been always in class room learning so devoting our time for a day to keep the grass down is something we all support for our own good. So, as we finished weeding, now the compound looks neat and full of fresh atmosphere.
Instructional time with students
One would think why not the use of mower to trim the grass. Yes, we used to apply mower to clear the field and any vantage points grown with grasses. But, the mower is faulty now. It needs a minor repairs before it can work. So we are taking action to get it repair soon to subside the manual weeding by the students.