Relearning how to teach…
I have always felt there are kids who need to be taught differently. Our education system I feel is designed for the majority of the student populace. It may not exactly be a standard bell curve as research indicates but putting it simply, there is always a small percentage of students who need to be taught more conscientiously. The slightly less gifted/more gifted or the ones still figuring it out.
As a kid I think I fit into the figuring out category. I had a very high IQ but I still grappled with a lot of stuff. Such students I guess need a different kind of training, one in more accordance to their strengths. For eg: When I evaluated myself post my school and college years, I realized I did not have a very good recall as far as reading was concerned though I used to be an avid reader. Seeing, listening and doing helped me better( if I could logically reason something).That could have been one of the reasons why I liked science. You could see it in you and all around you. The endless boring classroom lectures didn’t do me any good. Passive teaching was useless as far as I was concerned. One reason why I enjoy discussing concepts over reading long texts. The reading for me has to follow the practical most often.
My mother being ultra strict didn’t help me as a kid either. It is only my school principal who figured out how to best teach me the subject I wasn’t very good in. She realized that driving the same concept home in different ways would probably do the trick and trust me, it did make my foundation strong. At least for the first time I had started taking an interest in the subject.
Yelling at a kid while teaching is only detrimental. You could vent your frustration but it does nothing but butcher a little child’s confidence. You cannot spank numbers into your child or any topic for that matter. What we need to do is dismantle the already existing norm and re-assemble it with new ideas and methods for effective understanding and retention.
If you need to teach a child history, teach it like a story. Show them short movies of the same. Teach Geography by actually taking the kids for study tours. It’s lame trying to rote learn what soil grows where and the course of a river and it’s tributaries. Show it to them and they will never forget. Now, that comes with investment which very few are ready to make or can afford to make.
I had to figure out over the years how to best learn on my own. I had to sometimes as I call it, trick or cheat my brain into remembering. Repetition helped to some extent but trust me that is plain exhausting and saps the fun out of the process. As one of my wonderful mentors in med school told me, “When you learn, use all your senses-see, read, listen and write and if you can, then teach.” He had a point. It is about reinforcing the same concept using different neuronal pathways.”
It is important to identify those academic deviants in the classroom and groom them separately and who knows tomorrow you may not only be pleasantly surprised seeing your labor come to fruition but also may have helped a child from a life of self doubt and forced mediocrity. Covid sure did make me mull over all this. Most kids do over the years figure out eventually what they are good at. However the efforts have to start in the classroom. We need to relearn how to teach.
