After working as a teacher for more than two decades, Khaled Saleh says he has little to show for it.

The 51-year-old chemistry teacher, who works at a school in the Sahab area, currently earns around JD500 a month despite his 23 years of experience in education and an enduring passion for introducing his students to the world of science.

"My experience in the education sector was no bed of roses. I was giving a piece of myself for a difficult profession," said Saleh, who is participating along with public schoolteachers around the country in a strike demanding better compensation.

Financial hardship has led the Tawjihi teacher to try several times to start a new career, sometimes in fields he knew little about, but "destiny" has always brought him back to the same school, he told The Jordan Times on Thursday.

"I worked in the administration of a private company, but the company went bankrupt and I had to return to teaching to provide for my five-member family," the Abu Alanda resident noted.

Still, Saleh has always looked for other sources of income while teaching, such as starting a small business selling cleaning products.

The need to take second jobs to make ends meet is a common reality among public schoolteachers, whose salaries are on average the "lowest" in the public sector, according to activists.

"Teachers with 20 years or more experience earn the same salary as a newly appointed accountant," Raed Qatameen, head of the Jordan Teachers Committee's Tafileh branch, claimed.

Educators have been struggling to enjoy their rights for years now, with a sense of being held in "low esteem", but in light of the low salaries they receive, the recent rise in costs of living has inspired a sense of "deprivation" among teachers, Qatameen added.

Following a nationwide strike by teachers in 2010, the government took several measures to improve teachers' financial and social status, such as a series of raises over a period of one-and-a-half years.

In addition, under a Royal makruma announced by Their Majesties King Abdullah and Queen Rania, children of teachers admitted to public universities under the 5 per cent quota benefited from scholarships that covered all their tuition fees.

However, teacher activists point to the failure of successive governments to make good on a Royal makruma from 1996, in which His Majesty the late King Hussein promised teachers a professional allowance of 100 per cent of their basic salaries, as evidence that the state still does not treat educators with the respect they deserve.

For his part, Saleh said he still feels a sense of "epic accomplishment" whenever he finds out that a former student has landed a job with a "good" salary, but confessed that his pride in his work is tempered with "bitterness" that his two decades of work have yielded ''almost nothing" for him and his family.

"I couldn't save a penny after all these years of service," he noted.

Comments (0)

Write comment

Name

Comment

smaller | bigger

Add Comment Preview