
A Love Letter to Education
Some like to grow flowers or plants which they don’t eat or use and others like to collect things like stickers or match-boxes which they don’t sell or give away. We just love to develop minds and build-up our student list. Teaching is our true passion and a real ‘calling’ for us. We never fail to derive great satisfaction in bringing the students from the initial state of ‘Don’t Understand’ to an ‘Understood’ state. We obtain a great sense of fulfilment from our students’ successes. Every teaching session is so enjoyable to us that we always feel that the earth is spinning faster when we are teaching.
The primary goal we have for our students is to see learning as a very enjoyable life-long process and happily acquire the skills and base knowledge that enable them to continue to learn throughout their lifetime so that they can creatively innovate new grounds, boldly challenge the norm and constantly seek breakthrough in their works. We find students learn best with understanding, building new knowledge from past experience and prior knowledge, using skills like ‘What-If’ analysis, compare & contrast and consolidated summary etc. Learning should be an active process in which students construct and modify ideas, and integrate them into existing knowledge, building conceptual understanding and problem-solving ability as well as procedural facility. Knowledge is to be actively obtained and not passively received from any source. Our approach to teaching is to teach the students fundamental concepts and guide them to foster critical thinking, facilitate acquisition of life-long learning skills, and develop problem-solving strategies. We often tell students, “if you hear, you forget; if you know, you remember; if you understand, you have it for life; if you apply, you produce; and if you create, you just arrive.”
We always deliberately let students know that we hold very high expectations of them and believe in our abilities to teach all students, regardless of their prior knowledge or intellectual strengths and these high expectations and belief, in turn, compel but encourage them to meet the challenge. We feel that introducing the topic well is utmost important and spend substantial amount of time planning how to introduce a new topic to the students. For some topics, we pose a real-life problem for the students to ponder or ask them a question to arouse their curiosities and for others, we tell them a story to introduce the topics to them. In a syllabus-based curriculum, before we start a new topic, we will give the students an overview of the entire syllabus and the inter-relationship of this new topic to the others. This enables them to at least know what they don’t know as the most pathetic state is when students don’t know what they don’t know.
For the purpose of ensuring that no student is left out, we always treat all students as if they are ‘zero-based’ and systematically get them to understand the fundamentals right and fully. We usually pose a large variety of problems and generate an assortment of activities throughout the lesson, giving all students the opportunity to learn and express ideas and to develop not only procedural facility, but also self-confidence and problem-solving abilities. From the question and answer, we will find out how the students derive at the correct or wrong answer to understand their thought process and analysis and put right to them to reduce obtaining answers without understanding. To get the wrong answer for the right reasons is not good enough and to get the right answer for the wrong reasons is worse.
In a learning environment, we find laughter is a very good lubricant in the process of teaching and learning as we all learn better in a happy mood. To bring the students to a high level of understanding of a certain new concept, their attention is the most essential component and most teachers find gaining the attention of their students a very challenging task, especially that of the uninitiated students. Using humour, not only can capture the students’ attention more easily, but can also leave the students with a deeper impression of the concept. The laughter will in turn rejuvenate us and we will then conduct the class in a higher spirited mood. This forms a very positive re-enhancing loop. We are a keen advocate of interactive learning and creative teaching. We always believe that no students cannot be taught and no concept is too difficult to teach.
The relationship between our students and us is an interesting multi-facet one. When we assign students works or projects, we are like their manager or mentor, monitoring their progress, offering feedback and giving consultations and when we are training them to achieve a certain level of competency, we act as their coach, reprimanding as well as encouraging them. It is only when we are explaining concepts or helping them in their academic works that we feel like their teacher and tutor. And as teachers, the most important thing we do everyday is to know what to do to make our students better than yesterday. At times, when they are low-spirited or feel insecure, we play the role of a father and offer them some guidance and comfort. We always suggest to parents to be encouraging and supportive of their children in their process of learning, even if their results are below expectations. And for more serious behavioural problems, we perform the function of a counsellor. At other times, we simply interact with them as a friend so as to be able to empathise and blend with them. And when they become our teachers, that will ultimately be the most satisfying relationship as we will have obtained the great sense of fulfilment from their successes, our own little motivation that started us off as teachers.