By Simeon Tuyoleni
Teaching in a Namibian government school is hard in ways that do not get talked about enough.
Not hard in the way that every job has difficult days. Hard in the way that the basic conditions make it almost impossible to do the job properly.
Picture a teacher who has 40 learners in a classroom built for 25. They are teaching five different classes, sometimes more.
Every week they have to hand in detailed lesson plans for each class, which for five classes means 25 separate documents before they have taught a single lesson. They are marking hundreds of notebooks by hand.
And in many schools, the head of department or principal is also carrying a full teaching load because there are not enough teachers to fill all the posts.
This is not a picture of someone who does not care about their work. This is a picture of someone being asked to do too much with too little, and still showing up.
What makes it harder is that most of the admin work has very little to do with what is actually happening in the classroom. Lesson planning is an important part of teaching, but when it has to be written out in long, detailed documents every week for multiple classes, it starts to take up a lot of time and attention.
Those are hours that could be going into preparing better explanations, improving materials, or focusing on the learners who need extra support. Some schools are starting to use tools that help reduce some of this repetition and lighten the planning load. It is a small thing, but it gives teachers a bit more space to focus on what is happening with learners in front of them.
The teachers union has been raising concerns about burnout for some time now. That word gets used a lot but what it really means is that people are exhausted in a way that affects everything, including what happens in the classroom.
A tired teacher who is drowning in admin is not going to notice the one child in the corner who is quietly losing the thread. Not because they do not want to, but because there is no space left to notice anything.
Good teaching is about paying attention. To the child who is struggling. To the child who has stopped asking questions. To the moment when something that was explained three times still has not landed. That kind of attention takes time and energy. Both of which get used up long before the school day is over.
We also need to be honest about what this does over time. A teacher who is burnt out does not just have a bad week. They start losing some of the things that made them good at the job in the first place. Patience. The curiosity about why a child is not getting it. The willingness to stay after school for the learners who need extra help.
The learners writing their exams were prepared by teachers who gave more than what the conditions asked of them. That is worth saying. And it is worth asking what kind of results we might see if those same teachers were actually given what they need to do the job properly.
*Simeon Tuyoleni, a software engineer and founder of Asmbly, where we bring together the teachers, learners, and the system to improve the quality of education in Namibia and beyond.
