This article pays tribute to the role of played by teachers who sacrificed their time and lives during the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure that teaching and learning continued. The COVID-19 virus, which was first detected in Wuhan, China, mutated and rapidly spread across the world, reaching pandemic status by 11 March 2020. The South African government declared a national shutdown effective from 27 March 2020. This brought the operations of all private and public institutions to a halt. By mid-April, 192 countries across the globe had closed their schools and universities, which affected approximately 1.6 billion learners and students. The last time something like this had happened was with the outbreak of the Spanish flu just more than a century ago.

For almost three months no teaching took place in many public schools. In the midst of the pandemic, when it was considered dangerous to be in contact with people, including family members, teachers had to brave the Alert Level 3 conditions to return school to resume their teaching activities. Public schools were only allowed to resume teaching at the beginning of July after the Alert Level 4 had been reduced to Level 3. This posed several challenges for teachers. The loss of teaching and learning time had resulted in learning gaps which teachers had to attempt to remedy by offering extra lessons. However, the restrictions that were imposed during the different phases of the pandemic did not assist the catch-up programme. Because of the highly contagious nature of the virus, government imposed strict social distancing in classrooms.

Due to the regulations regarding social distancing, class sizes had to be reduced and schools were forced to introduce a rotation system, with learners attending school every alternate day. Learners in some grades attended school only once a month, which exacerbated the loss of teaching time and consequently also the learning gaps among learners.

According to the World Economic Forum, the pandemic has caused severe disruptions to many education systems. An estimated 147 million learners missed more than half of their usual in-person teaching in 2020 and 2021. As a result, this generation of children could lose $17 trillion in lifetime earnings. The United Nations advises that governments must implement ambitious programmes to recover learning losses.
The resumption of some forms of contact teaching posed some risks for teachers who had co-morbidities. Consequently, those teachers were exempted from coming to work, which further contributing to the loss of teaching and learning time. In her 2022/2023 budget vote, Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga mentioned that during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic approximately 3 300 teachers died due to the virus.

On this World Teacher’s Day, we remember the teachers who bravely continued teaching during the pandemic to keep teaching and learning going. To ensure that teaching and learning would take place, many risked their lives by using public transport to go to unsafe schools and classroom environments where the numbers of infected learners and teachers were increasing.

There are many in our society who failed to appreciate the precarious situation these teachers faced. Instead of empathising with them, some armchair-warming commentators kept on asking hard questions about the quality of teaching that was offered under those conditions. Yes, there are times when such questions are important and need to be raised, but in the warlike situation that the world faced the focus should have shifted to saving lives, rather than winning the war. That is what the teachers were involved in. Can you imagine the catastrophe of having to lose an academic year and what impact it would have on the current and future generations, on the economy and the overall socio-economic development of the country? We have to thank our teachers who put their lives on the line to avert this catastrophe.

The value of teachers
Despite the criticism they get from society, teachers are very valuable as educators. They equip learners with the knowledge, skills and ways of thinking and working needed for their future lives as leaders, entrepreneurs, scholars, innovators and workers in different vocations. They inspire students to achieve great things. Even in the midst of the pandemic, teachers had to support and inspire learners to be resilient, to aspire to achieve greater things in life, including passing the grades they were in. This year the matric class of 2020 is in their second year at various institutions of higher learning and those enrolled for three-year programmes will be completing their degrees or diplomas in 2023, thanks to the guidance, support and encouragement they received from their teachers.

It needs to be appreciated that teaching is not an eight-hour job with a few weeks of holidays. Teaching entails working long hours before and after school to plan lessons, mark work and connect with parents. It involves learning from colleagues and sharing good practice. It entails attending professional development programmes and upgrading qualifications in order to be remain relevant in the teaching profession. On top of that, teachers are often required to spend afternoons and weekends assisting with sports and other school activities.

They have to organise and attend camps, school trips, award events and parent nights. Some of these activities had to continue and the effort they required tripled during the pandemic. In an attempt to make up for the learning losses, many schools around the country extended their teaching activities into the weekends. We appreciate the commitment of teachers and school principals who made these sacrifices to ensure that the learners were better prepared for the future.

Our society is the most unequal in the world and the education system may be characterised by inequalities in terms of the allocation of resources and the quality of teaching and learning that takes place in these schools, but there are men and women who wake up every morning to continue teaching in under-resourced schools and classrooms, who in the past two years braved the pandemic to ensure that the academic year would not be lost. Some of them lost the battle to COVID-19 with their boots on.
On this World Teacher’s Day we would like to assure our teachers that their sacrifices have not gone unnoticed. We appreciate your efforts and wish you a happy World Teachers’ Day!