Problems facing by teachers

Teachers in Indonesia are facing many problems. It is not only about low paid but they were always critisised by many stakeholdres for not performing well. The low scores of students of the national examination at the end of every level (elementary schools, junior high schools and senior high schools) are always becoming a standard to judge the quality of their teaching. This phenomena sometimes create a more serious problems when the teachers orients their teaching to just pass the test by drill without paying a lot attention to the meaningful learning. A more serius that that when some of the teachers attempted to help students in answering the national exams, as one teacher told me recently, that we did that as the 2 hour test determined their future, not our years teaching. Another problems faced by the teachers are their confusing to the national curriculum changes, such as when they just started to implement the nw curriculum (KBK), they were informed the new curriculum (KTSP). Often, some people claimed that political situation really interfere the education system of Indonesia.

There has been many efforts to address the low quality of mathematics teachers and the teaching. For examples, several project for teacher training, developing learning packages, classroom action research, and so on. The common problems are the short period of the project or not ongoing; we were not informed the evaluatuin of the rpoject. The goverment have many institution that conduncting regular training to the selected teachers, and soo, and some of the seminar does not necessarily reflecting as having a good understanding of teacher's learning process. Sometimes, the messages from tha teacher training coul no be implemented in the schools due to the school local policy, the time restrictions as the curriculum, the emphasize to the students national exam preparation, or the lack of resources in their schools.