Saturday, May 22, 2010

Teaching is an art!!!

        Teaching is an art,which everyone must have experienced in their  school( lucky ones ). Teachers  spend more time with students than their parents. Radhakrishnan, Former President of India,was a teacher. In kind remeberance of him, we celebrate Teacher's Day.

Does  teachers of these days ( i don't mean everyone, there are few good ones.) are one,who teaches  life skills?

I have seen few teachers who teach(which they think they do), just to  complete the portions  and show it in their log book. They never worried about, " what extent a student understood the topic/subject?".

Completing the syllabus or teaching just for name sake, I don't call them as teachers. Do you?.

One example, I would like to say :

If a primary student was given a problem something like .


 Add

    57
+ 24
----------------
   711
-----------------

When this is what the student writes , the present day  teacher simply  marks wrong, without seeing or asking how the child got this as a answer?

What the child wrote is perfectly correct in his point-of-view.

Because the teacher only taught him that, 7+4 = 11 and 5+2 =7.

So, when a student makes a mistake like the above one, the teacher must say "What u have done is correct but a small correction is neccessary".

57 means 5 tens + 7 ones.
24 means 2 tens + 4 ones.

7 ones + 4 ones is 11(which in turn means 1 ten and 1 one).
5 tens + 2 tens is 7 tens.
So we must add the 1 ten to 7 tens. ( We can add apples to apples and oranges to oranges , not apples to orange.)

so the answer will be 81.

Can you say me a teacher who does all these?. Students are not the one to be  blamed for the  level of thinking. Once a child is made to be naive, we cannot make the child to think. He can't develop that any more. ( 5thil valayadhadhu 50thilum valayadhu - Tamil Proverb).

My dear fellow,if you are taking your profession as a teacher. Be a architect of the student.

Courtesy: Nair sir.

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