By Mr Kwok
Teachers’ Day has come and passed. Like Christmas Day and New Year, this special day presents an opportunity for us to reflect on our actions as teachers and teaching as a profession. My reflections below are not exactly fresh insights. Others have written about similar ideas in the past while others will continue likewise in the future. Teaching as a profession will no doubt persist as long as civilisation exists but it is always a good thing to remind ourselves once in a while of what it means to be teachers.
Those of us providing tuition services, whether as home tutors or tuition centres, are no more or no less teachers compared to our peers in mainstream schools. Despite differences in job scope, teaching with all its implications still lies at the heart of our job.
At the Heart of Teaching – Passion for the Job & Concern for our Students
Though I cannot speak for every teacher, I am pretty sure most of us share a passion in teaching, a passion for sharing our knowledge, skills and experience with our students. Perhaps, deep in our psyche, we all believe in creating a better world through education.
Nevertheless, a passion in teaching is but an empty shell if we do not genuinely want our students to do better in their studies, if not, in life. Time is always a constraint. We only have so much time to bring a certain number of students up to speed. Yet, most of us do not mind squeezing in extra time to help the weaker students, often at the expense of our own personal or professional time.
We do not ask for gratitude from any of our students or their parents. Seeing them do well in their studies is a reward in itself. Nevertheless, it is always a pleasure to receive gifts on Teachers’ Day. I know that this is frowned upon in mainstream schools but we take it for what it is – an appreciation of our efforts in teaching. Perhaps even more valuable than gifts are words of thanks and appreciation from our charges. It used to be cards in the old days. Now, a message on social media can do wonders to our morale just the same.
To the students out there, we teachers are too humans who experience the full repertoire of emotions. We too feel energised by words of encouragement and of affirmation of our efforts. Do not shy away from giving us that proverbial pat on our backs. It means a lot to us.
2020 – The Toughest Year for Teachers?
2020. The Covid-19 pandemic hit the world hard. For most of us in Singapore, we do not experience war or natural disasters. The Hotel New World collapse is literally history. Even SARS felt so distant. Covid-19 is probably THE crisis of our lifetime.
As for education, it has been toppled on its head. The New Normal, as many said, has arrived. Education has received widespread coverage in the media, either in terms of the changes in teaching methodology via technology or from the perspective of the students and parents who grapple with these new methodologies. Many issues about online teaching and learning have surfaced in that time. Parents had a hard time adjusting to home based learning because they cannot be sitting next to their kids throughout the lesson to solve the technical issues that inevitably cropped up.
What about teachers?
The underlying assumption is teachers are expected to roll with the changes, adapt to them and become adept at using these new technologies. Teaching and learning materials are expected to be produced overnight in time for next day’s lessons. We are expected to solve the various technical issues faced by students and parents. “No, Mr Tan, the lesson is not a mime performance… Yes, you need to set the audio to ‘computer’ so that you can listen to the teacher in Zoom as he teaches your child the intricacies of photosynthesis.”
We are not at the front line of battling the pandemic like healthcare workers or even food delivery riders. But the challenges are no less real or pressing. Please do not take the above comments as ranting. Instead, they are a realistic portrayal of what teachers face.
I came across an especially poignant comic by Josef Lee that provides a visual description of the Covid situation for teachers. For the visual learners out there (including me), it certainly brings across the message much more effectively than I could with words. Its title already gives the reader a preamble of what the comic is about – “Teachers, are you okay?“
Final Thoughts – The Future of Teaching & Learning (T&L)
The curtain has yet to fall for Covid-19. Its variants still continue to plague the emergence of an effective vaccine.
Online teaching and learning is set to continue and become even more pervasive. If you have not gotten used to online learning as a student or online teaching as a teacher, you are already behind the curve in this new normal. New T&L products will keep filtering into the marketplace while current platforms will evolve, often into interactions between teachers and students unimaginable now. Embrace online T&L or be prepared to lose out to your competitors and end up unable to fit into the future society. The consequences are that serious.
However, some things never change in T&L. As given above, the heart of a teacher must still beat with passion for teaching and concern for his students. Also given in a previous post on the 8 C’s of teaching, an effective lesson still has to apply the 8 C’s e.g. comical events, connection to real life, clarity. (Read the full post for the other C’s.) This is true regardless of the bells and whistles offered by the latest e-learning platform or e-book. Poor delivery and content still look pathetic no matter how you sugarcoat it.
At the end of the day, we do not know what the future will bring. Another crisis or pandemic could be lurking around the next corner. Neither can we be sure how it will play out, what new regulations will come into place or what kind of constraints we will face. Being adaptable is right at the top of my list to survive as a student, a teacher or anyone in any disruption to our current normal. If you are the actionable sort and do not want to sit around waiting for the next crisis, I suggest that you read Nicholas Taleb’s books to learn about implementing a barbell strategy to prepare yourself.
There, I have completed my reflection for Teachers’ Day. Have you?