For almost
2 years of my full time teaching... I have met a few kinds of kids! I believe
there are more out there. There are those who are eager to learn, those who are
born smart, those who are artistic but not strong academically, those whose
logic doesn’t work AT ALL, but have extremely good memory, those who are
attention seekers, those who are hungry for praises, and many other more.
There is no
one right way in teaching children. I once read about something that said when
you tell a kid something, it doesn’t work, it may be you are the one who is a
failure. Then, you try other way and he/she still doesn’t get it, again, the
blame is still on you. You will always be the one to blame until the kid gets
it! It is kinda true. Some teachers (including me) will put up our arguments
saying some kids are just so hard to teach! Yes.... the word is “so hard” which
means it is still possible to teach them, it’s just we have to try harder.
Although try to be just, we spend a-4-hours-weekly time with them, and parents and
school teachers spend about a hundred hours with them (after deducting 8 hours
sleeping time daily), so the question is... we can try so hard within that 4
hours, if school teachers and parents do not put the effort to help, what power
do we have?
Anyway,
after 18 months, one thing that works for sure is motivation. It works BEST!
Simple one... I always give a kid a sticker if they do well in the exercise
that I gave when they do well in their test (yet... I always remind them the
score is just the score, keeping in mind my how bad the school system nowadays
is... not better than what I used to get before... lots of them are memorizing
without understanding). The sticker works really well! The kids put more effort
to make sure they can get an extra sticker in each meeting which at the end when
they have collected enough, they have the right to pick a small present from my
collection, from stationery to toys.
The
problems only occur when the kids have so many in their possessions that they
don’t see the need of putting effort in getting those small prezzie from me. I
can’t do much. So to parents out there (I am not one yet, but I would like to
remind myself, when I were to be one someday), please please please make sure
to encourage your kids to put their hardest effort to earn something that they
want/deserve, even if you can provide it to them easily. This may be valuable
in the future.
I too
realize that this stickers-collecting gives a lesson of “fair competition”, a
good mom help me with this. So here is the scenario, I had a “beautiful” hello
kitty shelf in which they have to collect more stickers in order to get that.
There were 3 kids (2 are sisters) who were interested in it, so... the 2
sisters asked me if they could combine their stickers and got the hello kitty.
So my idea was if they wanted to combine, they had to ‘spend’ more stickers
on that. If initially I need 30 stickers from a student, I asked 40 from 2 of
them, 20 each. Then they went back and discussed about it. The next day, the
elder sister told me that they weren’t going to combine their stickers, because
it would be unfair to the other kid who was working alone in getting it. Bravo!
What a good lesson~ J Good teacher alone can’t really do
that, Good parents do!!!
I mentioned
I have kids who are artistic and not academically strong. She is a girl who is
really bad in memorizing, but she made me a 3D paper house, she jumped in to
help whenever the other kids need some favors. I really do not know if it is
always good, or she is just being busy-body, but I know for sure that’s her at
her best, which cannot be graded in the report book at school. What can I do to
kids like that, while school nowadays requires a lot of memorizing and not
understanding. She is definitely not a failure although grading in school had
ranked her as part of a few underperformed students.
Conversely
there is another boy who is extremely good in memorizing, but has no logic AT
ALL. He doesn’t know how to form a sentence that say “We had a running
competition today and it was held on the fifth floor”. Instead he told me in a few
sentences with broken grammar (even in his own mother tongue), he said “we run
competition. on the cloud (to indicate that it is high). Yesterday, Thursday
(not even know how to say “just now”).” This boy is eager to learn. He has
never been lazy-ing around, although sometimes I can see he is tired and
day-dreaming, but he has always showed up, even when he was sick, by choice!
There are
no perfect kids/individuals. Being parents are not easy either. I am trying my
very best not only teaching the kids things they can get in their textbooks. I
want the kids that are with me now, would know how to be polite, be kind, and
be hardworking. Hoping that the society they are in now don’t get them down,
instead let them be the light to their parents, friends and people surrounding
them! Yoohooo... as cliché as it sounds, I really hope that! :)