Giving heart and soul
TEACHERS today are highly qualified, skilled and competent.
There are many opportunities available for teachers to improve themselves academically and professionally.
The Education Ministry encourages teachers to upgrade themselves by offering them in-service and full time courses so that they would become effective teachers.
In the early days, many of us from teacher training colleges graduated with a teaching certificate or a diploma.
After completing a certain number of years of teaching service, we could apply to do our undergraduate degrees. But not everyone was selected to further their studies.
As a result, we had this divide of graduates and non-graduates in primary and secondary schools.
The last few years saw non-graduates comprising mostly senior teachers retiring and leaving the service.
Teachers in primary and secondary schools today are graduates with many having their Master’s and some with Phd degrees.
Today teacher trainees from Teacher Education Institutes graduate with a degree and then immediately embark on their Master’s programmes.
Many of these young teachers are computer savvy and are competent in technology to teach in the classroom.
All these knowledge, skills and competency need to be translated in the classroom to the children as their teaching and learning platform.
The teacher with all his qualifications and competencies has to scale down his lessons to the level of his children in order to be able to have a genuine rapport and understanding with the pupils.
The teachers need to establish a genuine relationship with the children so that they will like the teacher and listen to what s/he is saying.
To create and develop this trust
and bond, teachers have to touch the hearts of the children.
Without connecting to their hearts, children will not take heed of the teaching and learning experience in the classroom, no matter how proficient and competent and qualified the teacher is.
The teacher has to touch hearts, teach minds and transform lives.
The following story will illustrate the missing ingredient that teachers need to make an impact on the children.
A long term study was carried out by Oxford and Cambridge Universities’ researchers at a particular high school in a remote
part of England.
The aim of the study was to evaluate the potential of the children in the rural school and assess how the children would fare in their life after finishing high school.
The researchers interviewed all the children who were in their penultimate semester of high school.
At the end of the exhaustive interview, the researchers who comprised top academicians concluded that the majority of the children in the rural school would not finish high school.
Several years later the university researchers returned to the
school and through the records traced the students who they had interviewed.
The researchers were shocked to learn that most of the students had completed high school successfully and moved on to college and were employed in high paying jobs in the UK.
The researchers could not believe that these students who were considered failures and ‘hopeless’ had become successful in life.
And so the researchers tracked these students and interviewed them to find out how their lives had been transformed.
Every one of the ex-students of the school related about a particular teacher who was posted to the school after the research who played a significant role in the lives of the students.
The teacher was able to motivate and inspire the students and gave her heart and soul in the teaching classroom.
The researchers were overwhelmed and felt that their quest for the ideal teacher had been discovered and so they decided to interview this teacher who was able to transform and motivate failures to success.
When they traced the teacher and asked her the million dollar question, ‘what was her secret of impacting her students’, the retired teacher simply replied, ‘I cared and loved them as my own children’.
Therein lies the greatest quality a good teacher needs to possess — to love students unconditionally and treat them as their own children.
There are many children in our classroom who come from different homes and situations — children who have lost parents, from single parent homes, latch key children, abused and neglected children and unless we can touch them with love and care, we will lose them forever.
To transform the lives of the children, a teacher should be passionate about his teaching.
Teachers should be passionate about their teaching and their children.
The school is a building with classrooms while the classroom is a building with four walls with the future in it.