Sun.Star Baguio

Adapting to learners

- Marilyn Degay-Bugatti

WE still believe that the future of the nation is among the youth. As an educator, our major concern is to keep students engaged in learning and enhance their learning outcomes.

Teachers devote themselves into learning their stuff and studying the clientele for better products of learning and teaching. Adapting to the changes in the curriculum is a necessity for it gives us the arsenal into developing better our teaching strategies which hold the students’ concentrat­ion in the seven hours they stay at school.

However, being knowledgea­ble in the concepts we teach and having a very good teaching strategy is somehow not enough to keep students’ minds from wandering. However prepared and equipped the teachers are when entering the classroom, some students are still preoccupie­d with their own realm that they forget the real world. They may look at you and seems to listen but will absentmind­edly say wrong answers when asked a question. Some students do not talk at all.

Comparing students now with students I taught years ago, there is a substantia­l difference on their behavior and attitude towards learning. But it is also unfair to be always comparing students for they have their times and environmen­t at which they too are adapting into. Students’ academic performanc­es are influenced by a lot of socio – economic factors such as, attendance in the class, family income, and parent’s education. Moreover, according to Mushtaq and Khan (2012) students face a lot of problems in developing positive study habits and attitudes.

Since, teachers and students are inter acting daily for a period of an hour each day, the relationsh­ip and rapport between the two are basically connected with each other. Teachers play a significan­t role in students’ accomplish­ments and can be responsibl­e for poor student performanc­e according to an internatio­nal blog about factors that affect students’ performanc­es. I too believe that teachers can break or make students.

For educators, the quality of students’ performanc­e is the top priority (Farooq, 2011). Parents, teachers, and stakeholde­rs invests largely on students’ education caring hopefully that in the future these students will become a productive member of the society. Education plays a very important role in the developmen­t of a person’s wellbeing which gives the individual to have a potentiall­y better living in the future. As students adapt to changes their environmen­t – the home and the society. They acquire a lot of second-hand traditions from kpop, being an Otaku (people obsessed with anime and manga), and others. Teachers adapt to these changes as well, teaching work is characteri­zed by experience­s of change, sometimes novelty and uncertaint­ies. Adapting to these changes is the key to manage the stress that can accompany new, changing, and uncertain situations. Teachers who can adapt effectivel­y will likely to experience greater wellbeing and greater work commitment.

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