The challenge of teaching – the good and the bad
Hi there, below is my 5 cent about the challenge of teaching. This is obviously my personal view, but I hope that it will lead you to some positive actions.
I have added as well a video (see below) that is called “The Work of Teaching and the Challenge for Teacher Education” it is quite long but it is quite interesting if you have the patience to watch it. The below video is by Dean Deborah Ball from the University of Michigan School of Education .
The challenge of teaching
Each little person gives you a different type of challenge. With children you need to keep them happy and interested. If I can’t make learning fun … well at least some of the time – I feel that I am not winning the game. Kids should not learn because they are afraid from the teacher or from the parents – they should learn because they are thirsty for knowledge. Can this happen? Yes in some cases, not with all kids. When I was a child I loved to study until few teachers came along that just hated being asked questions. With the years the teachers were more and more stressed and liked being asked less and less. The most important thing for them was that that we will get good results in our test and that we will cover all the material that we need according to the board of education. Well we covered the materials but we hated it – much of the time.
With children you have to be quick and inventive and bring with you lots of enthusiasm! You can’t trick kids – if you do not want to teach them, and if don’t really enjoy it – they will know! You should encourage them to ask questions. They should really understand the issues and not memories them. Once they really learn to think for themselves, and find the answers and the question then they start to enjoy the game of learning.
Another important point is that each person and each little person got his strength and weakness. When we teach (especially with the smaller kids) – we can and we should create a lot of different activities. Apart from standard frontal teaching we can do many things in class such as painting, singing, acting (e.g. drama activities). My point is that in this way each child can find the things that he is good at. No one is good or bad at everything – we just need to give the children an opportunity to feel it.
As a parent…
On a similar point as a parent I try to give my daughter some activities that she finds really easy like drawing and some activities that are harder like riding a bike. By the way I tied up a rope ladder to one of the trees in the yard for her to climb. She just could not do it to start with and we spend hours together on that. Well now she can do it and she is really proud as she get that point that she managed to do something that was really hard for her.
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