18 months of Teaching

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! :)