ESSENCE OF TECHNOLOGY AND LIVELIHOOD EDUCATION
What is the essence of TLE in our daily life? Is technology important? Technology is fast changing. Development and innovation makes the world exciting. New inventions are virtually introduced every day. Nowadays technology is not a want, but a need that we have to provide because it is included in almost all aspects of our lives. The importance of technology is to provide comfort of use in whichever it is. It makes our work lighter and easier.
Let cite telephone as an example. With the use of telephone, communication is not a problem because anyone can connect and speak to someone using this technology anytime and anywhere. Telephone makes the conversation meaningful and easy to understand. Computer is another technology that is intended to compute but eventually turn into device that can perform number of operations per second. Using this electronic machine students can do research in all topics assigned to them and even personal browsing to learn new ideas about education, business, sports, lifestyle, and, culture. Another technology is cellular phone. Cellphone is probably the technology that students want to have because of its interesting features and applications.
That is why at the beginning of the school year and the teacher learns that she will be handling a bully student in the previous grade, will make the teacher feel hopeless. She will already foresee that she will have a miserable teaching career for the next ten months.
But the question is… Is there really a hope for bullies? Will the idiom, “a leopard can’t change its spots” apply to them? In a regular class you will expect to have a mixture of intelligent, average and struggling pupils. These pupils are easy to deal with. The challenge a teacher would always have is how to deal with bullies.
To lessen the inappropriate behavior inside your classroom you may consider some of these tips. You make sure that classroom rules and regulations are clear and attainable. They should be presented to all the pupils before formal lessons start. The pupils will follow these rules better if they are the one who authored them. The teacher may just start with issues and then she lets her pupils come up with the rules related to it. Post these rules inside the classroom. Pupils’ signature or thumb print may be included to make them feel that are really the authors of their classroom rules.
Do not ignore the petty complains of the pupils about a classmate who bully them. If it happens during class hours and you are so engrossed with your lesson, still attend to that child without affecting the rest of the class by asking the child to write a narrative of what happened in a piece of paper. Let the child write the date, the incident and finish it by writing his name and affix his signature.
Talk to the victim and the bully separately. After hearing both sides, have a meeting with both of them and let them come up with their solution to what happened. You can ask them like “What do you think you can do know to solve this issue?” Most of the time they can resolve their own issues. Let them write it and affix both of their signatures. These documents should be included in their anecdotal records. If issues are bigger, we may call for their parents. It is also important to monitor both behaviors after the incident.
After resolving the incident, it is the task of the teacher to conduct a casual interview with the bully. This will make the teacher understand the pupil better. Most of the bullies are coming from dysfunctional families. If you see a potential leadership qualities with him, you can give him a special task in the classroom, this will divert his energy from disturbing his classmate to something positive. It is also important to talk to the rest of the class that you are giving special tasks to this bully in order to make them productive. The class should support the teacher by not teasing the classmate. At the end, these bullies of our classroom are might just be misunderstood. Let us know them better, give our rust and respect. Don’t give up on them but be patient, who knows, these bullies may turn to be good buddies.
— oOo— The author is Teacher III at Lourdes Northwest Elementary School, Angeles City