By Patrick Kaboyo

Not all parents have a good understanding of their children’s growth and development challenges.

To some, a child being fidgety, restless, easily bored, having trouble sitting still, or balancing their listening skill may not be easily understood as being hyper or a manifestation of a behavioral disorder. 

While hyperactive children are often misunderstood, labeled, and branded stubborn, our Ugandan education system has not offered differentiated instruction options to remedy special learners. 

There is hardly tangible intervention to cater for the overly genius and slow learners in our schools. It is only available in an international school. Quite often, learners with special needs are unsupported, ignored, misunderstood, and misrepresented by the very teachers who teach them. It is worse than even the very parents of such children, equally do not understand them. 

Since it is a fact that most behavioural disorders among children are as a result of varied nurture and nature contexts, it is no doubt, COVID-19 has offered a timely scientific solution to the unending poor sleep quality students have suffered at school before the lockdown. 

If you subject every learner to the Pittsburg Quality Sleep Index (PSQI) before lockdown, you will find many manifesting severe sleep disorders as a result of the too much hyped cramming and rote learning practiced in schools. Before the lockdown, both teachers and learners were at the verge of becoming academic zombies since to them, good quality sleep is far from being a prerequisite for good health and wellbeing. 

Both day and boarding schools have not helped learners to benefit from quality sleep but rather inculcated to them, habits of sleeping late and waking up early to respond to preps. Not that preps are bad, the only bad thing about them is that schools have totally disregarded the danger of poor sleep quality among learners. 

Serious scholars need to interrogate the efficacy of lack of enough sleep among learners in Uganda to sort their growth and development deficits. Learners need to be liberated from the current academic conundrum. They need to be fully supported to develop their cognitive abilities and not to subject them to beginning of term exams, mid- term exams, end of term exams as well as holiday exams. 

Too much academic work as homework with little focus on project work will undermine learner intellectual independence and discovery.  

Waking up toddlers as early as 5:00 am to catch up with the school bus or van not only does it retard their mental abilities but also undermines the value of education at critical stages of instruction and transformation.  Learners will continue to doze in buses and in class, all in the name of academics. Many learners have ended up wounded exacerbating the already worse situation. 

As a result, many learners have developed bad sitting and standing posture, uncoordinated speech, unacceptable gestures as well as negative temperaments, all undermining acceptable behavior. 

As schools get nearer to opening for the 2021/2022 Academic calendar, the Ministry of Education and Sports should not only focus on teacher psychosocial and psychological needs alone but rather focus on learner needs as well.

Since we are already implementing the National Teacher Policy which require all teachers to have a graduate qualification, it is high time those higher qualifications helped teachers to fully understand learners’ cognitive and emotional needs as derived from the many theories they will learn from their graduate courses. 

To be precise, every parent desires a highly qualified teacher for their sons and daughters. Our children deserve to be in the hands of highly qualified, exposed, knowledgeable, and experienced teachers. 

A teacher with requisite attributes will not only be professional but also psychologically and pedagogically grounded in practicum to effectively support teaching and learning processes for all learners.

Teachers should therefore be encouraged to value child study, school practice, and peer teaching as best practices.

COVID-19 will not only be remembered for its ravaging effect but also offering opportunities for learning, reflection, and reconstruction. To a greater extent, the pandemic should be credited for guaranteeing good sleep quality for learners as they prepare to resume school.

The writer is a teacher and social worker 
pmkaboyo@gmail.com