Anomalies of models in teaching
The hands that hold the light are those that help shape the future, and exceptional hands they are, for they belong to teachers.
Icould say, as a long-time teacher, that only the first string of teachers takes students by the hands while there is no end to those who fall from grace. One of my dearly beloved mentors, Dr. Juan Birion, former UST professor and PUP vice-president, offers similar reasons why some skew the class curve.
There are anomalies of models in teaching, first in the primary and elementary grades. Non-English speaking teachers are teaching English-dominant subjects such as Math, English, and Science. Funny thing is, an out-of-tune teacher teaches Music.
Just imagine an elementary science teacher writing “Charle Darwin” on the board – without an “s” – and one smart student corrects her that it must be “Charles.” Then the teacher says, “Charle is only one, if you add ‘s’ to Charles, it’s already many.” I will have to speak for the teachers that at least the teacher knows a rule on plurals to save face.
Students become weak when teachers do not know what to teach, for how will they give something they don’t have? My point is, BSEEd students must specialize in a subject which they can teach well, because it is where they are gifted. Can you imagine too, how poor teachers manage to handle a class made up of both slow and fast learners?
In the secondary level, there are less problems since every faculty teaches a particular major subject. The only question is if the teacher is effective in keeping it up.
Say, is History interesting because the teacher tells a story that leads students to have a right sense of history, or does it comprise a heavy rote memory drill that leads to a battery of tests on dates, events, and personalities?
In the collegiate tier, it’s commonplace to see engineers, doctors, lawyers or managers juggling between careers and academics as parttime teachers. They instruct with the idea that college is an independent study or a mecca for research, yet they lack the principles, methods, psychology of differentiated teaching, classroom interaction and socialization framework that students need to carry over in the workplace.
Otherwise, the full-time teacher’s typical day full of disjunct tasks – from the regular school load and home errands, attending seminars, trainings, projects and researches – is nothing less than slow torture. When teachers engage in research work overtime, students beg the usual questions: How far have these researches really contrib“Doing uted to society’s welfare and economy, apart from the travel grants and incentives for teachers and passing marks for schools’ standardization and accreditation? Would academic gains dwindle if teachers compromised to leave the classrooms to devote more time to research? Is getting a support group of professional researchers to teachers doing the obligated research a helpful solution?
Then again, college students take issue: Do the millions of thesis produced annually benefit the country to become more prosperous and citizens more disciplined and productive? How about taking off those voluminous files of past researches stocked in archives, finding use for them, and getting proposed outcomes done by present researchers with the rightful consent of the owners?
it will erase the ‘status-symbol image’ put into research work,” students say.
In our desire to harmonize, our silent and willing complicity becomes a mere technical convenience thrown in the way of those aggrieved – ready and waiting for our helping hands. Shall we start to make Shakespeare’s line in “Measure for Measure”: “Thus wisdom wishes to ap- pear most bright,” shine in every classroom for the young and the grown-ups from now on?
When I was a kid, I preferred my dentist who asked “Open your mouth,” to my teachers who said, “Shut up!”