Tag Archives: Leslie Lett

Call for a STRONG Voice to Curb “Misbehaving and Deviance”

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The following was shared by Leslie P. Lett’s who is a Secondary School teacher of some repute to Facebook.

Many great ideas and recommendations came from our members who are the ones in the “trenches” daily…and they have been coming for quite some time. Surely, they deserve a hearing and an exploration by Officialdom.

I am very heartened to hear the news that the principals have now said that they, as an association – BAPPSS – stand ready to work with the parents of those children who are “misbehaving and deviant”.

Some questions, though?

  1. Haven’t teachers been engaging and earnestly attempting to engage the parents forever?
  2. Haven’t teachers called the parents on many different occasions to discuss their children?
  3. Haven’t teachers been meeting with the parents at Year level meetings?
  4. Haven’t teachers communicated to parents their willingness to meet with them and discuss their children?
  5. Don’t teachers write reports on these children every single term?
  6. Haven’t teachers voiced their serious concern about these children to parents and their principals many times before violent eruptions – reported and unreported in the national media?

Make no mistake about it…teachers have forever been engaging with parents about their children, ever ready and willing to work with them for the benefit of their children…our children.

Teachers had better destroy any false, misguided and perverted narratives otherwise that some people wish to present in a concerted and deliberate campaign to besmirch us! That is the teachers’ real struggle right there!
Sitting back and allowing oneself to be mischaracterised, maligned, disrespected and dismissed will lead to only one destination…and spawn an even more precarious and unsafe environment in which the most effective teaching and learning must be fostered.

Teachers, we have to join our hands, put our minds together, link our arms, and stand up and speak out against the many subtle and not-so-subtle assaults upon our integrity and daily commitment to our profession, to our charges, and to our country.

Because, make no mistake about it, these attacks will be coming with an increased frenzy and fury.
We will need to depend on our solidarity if we wish to be strong enough to counter and, ultimately, defeat them! And be a strong voice in any charting of the way forward of our system of education in Barbados.

The choice is ours. No one else’s. OURS.

FED UP! | Barbados Advocate

We Need Heroes!

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The following was written by Leslie Lett, a teacher and posted to Facebook – shared by Barbados Underground

We need Heroes! They are as essential to our Living as the air, water, food, shelter. Heroes establish and articulate our preferred moral worldview. And validate it.

Their Orientation, their Spirit, their Lives are to be presented as qualities to be emulated. They are our role models. They are to inspire us. And, I believe, most important of all, they are to PREPARE us. Their sufferings are to steel us for the reality that our own heroic impulses and behaviours will inevitably bring down upon us the same crosses and crucifixions that were their lots.

Because heroes always resist and defy the status quo entrenched by Power & Authority. That is the quintessence of the Hero.

And the response of this Power & Authority is always possessed of the singular intent of crushing such defiance and resistance. It’s an existential battle.

So even as Power & Authority huffs and puffs grandiloquently, reciting the carefully rehearsed syllables praising past heroes, the same Power & Authority would wish to downplay (if not distort!) this aspect of Defiance and Resistance. It becomes obvious that we love heroes – when they are dead and gone! More often than not, when they are very much alive and with us and asserting their heroic qualities, they are – by Power & Authority – maliciously mocked and viciously vilified as noisy troublemakers, running about making nuisances of themselves. Most of them have even been branded in their own life-time as “treacherous”, “unpatriotic”, “instigators of disruption and civil strife” and “enemies of the state/people”, “unreasonable” rabble-rousers, unconscionable mercenaries committing misconduct of a serious nature…irritants and recalcitrants who need their heads cracked and tails shooting.

These are the crowns of thorns inflicted on heroes. Thorns not Laurels.

But heroes CHOOSE to do no different IN SPITE OF all this.

They forward on with the firm and unshakable conviction that they struggle for a Just Cause so much bigger than their individual selves – a Public Good that transcends private concerns.

And that is the message our Heroes proclaim to each and every one of us.

It’s not just about you!!!

Take a strength, take a courage from the ones we revere as our Heroes.

I wish all my teaching colleagues a truly reflective National Heroes Day.