COVID 2019 outbreak: The disappointment in Indian teachers

Coronavirus disease or commonly known as COVID19 is the news of every single second since it originated from Wuhan, China (Wang et al., 2020), which is declared as a pandemic disease by World Health Organization, said to be caused by a new strain of the virus. The disease is said to spread through droplets of saliva or discharge from the nose of an infected person, particularly when he/she sneezes or coughs (World Health Organization, 2020). Though the human coronaviruses have been recognized now for many years, the lack of immunity to the identified new strain, there is a large portion of the population susceptible to it (Goyal et al., 2020). Besides, the latest trend of the exponential increase in the infected people, with a steep rise of 69.17 % within three days from 21st March 2020 to 23rd March 2020 (Kiprosh, 2020), and because of the lack of preventive vaccine (El Zowalaty and Järhult, 2020), there has been a high panic situation amongst the local public.

To take control of the situations, the Government of India issued the guidelines on social distancing and has been communicating to the entire population through different channels successfully (World Asia, 2020). Besides, 82 districts all over the country have been locked down to get control over the situation (Hindustan Times, 2020). However, another step taken to prevent the spread of the discussed epidemics is the closure of educational institutes in various states. Nevertheless, the setback was that the closure included only the holidays declared to students and not to the faculty members. This decision of withholding the teachers back on the job has created a lot of psychological impacts on the morale of the teachers. The teaching community is trying to question back as how are they safe from the pandemic disease if not the students and on the other hand few educational institutes are mulling to terminate a few teachers for saving the money (Times of India, 2020a). Teachers irrespective of being in private or government institutes all over highly disappointed with the inhumane behavior with them compared to the industries and companies giving a work-from-home facility to their employees (Times of India, 2020b). The magnitude of agitation has gone to such heights that recently, an online petition was circulated namely “#KeepTeachersSafe.” The petition is being signed to ask the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) and Health Ministry and the Human Resource Development Ministry (MHRD) to immediately issue a directive asking all educational institutions (schools and colleges) to be closed till March 31, 2020, for teachers and other staff as well. In just four days, 53,325 faculty members have signed the petition (Parekh, 2020), which shows the disappointment of the Indian teaching community. The disappointment here is not due to the lethargic attitude of teachers but the fear of getting infected and being a carrier for the family and neighbors. This if continued can bring the teacher’s morale down and a teacher’s moral is very complex as the research has proved very well how it affects the student learning process (Mackenzie, 2007). A frustrated and demoralized teacher have proved to have a negative behavior towards the students community (Greenwood and Soar, 1973).

In this situation, the Indian government must think of balancing between keeping the teachers engaged in the academic area without risking their life. Instead of forcing a teacher to get into the institute and load him with additional academic and non-academic duties, the government, universities and institutes must take specific alternative positive steps. For example, the teachers today are mostly computer educated and the era today is of the internet, so one can be instructed to get the administrative work done from home. Also, the present time shall be utilized by the institutes by providing the teachers the free access to a few paid e-learning platforms or academic article databases and tell them to utilize it from their home. Free online faculty development programs and conferences can be arranged. The inspiration given with care shall naturally boost the morale of the teachers. The continuous positive attitude towards teachers will lead to an improved teaching-learning system when they return to work after the unpredicted and unwanted break caused due to COVID 2019 outbreak.

Funding statement

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Contributors

All authors contributed equally.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.