On the day I reported for duty at my first school, I did not have a car. I was offered by my parents to buy a brand new one if I wanted to. I rejected the idea, choosing instead to buy my parent's old third car for a price that is ten times cheaper than that of a brand new car.
To give you a bit of a background, the car is a Proton Iswara, one of Malaysia's first car brands and one of the earliest models to be produced. My family bought the car in 1995. By the time it was handed to me, it was a good 15 years old. Nevertheless it got to one place to the other, so I was not complaining.
I had the car for a good four years before it was sold off. Throughout those four years, the car was like an ailing old man, needing to be cared for ever so frequently. The list of problems were numerous, so let's stick to the major ones...
The Problems
I woke up one morning and noticed that the car would not start. My friends were more than happy to help me jump start the car. However, that happened day after day. Soon, I realized that something was draining the battery of my car and even the mechanics could not find out what was wrong. Thus, every night before I slept, I had to disconnect the battery. Every morning, I had to reconnect it to ensure that the car does not die on me.
I could live with that and it taught me how to disconnect car batteries. However, the worse came when my car decided that my driving was too fast and I had to slow down. It decided that from now till eternity, it will go at the new speed limit of 20km/h. I learnt two lessons that day:
- If you avoid eye contact, you can't see how mad people are on the road.
- Not all mechanics have your best interest in mind.
I had to visit a few shops to get my gear box fixed. Fortunately, with Google, you get to know what's the cheapest way to solve a particular problem. This helps you stay clear of some mechanics who may decide to get you to change parts that are completely unnecessary. It was a great learning experience and in many cases, this helped me realize something with teaching.
The Lessons In Teaching
Not all subjects are made equal. There are times where a teacher may be assigned an extremely boring or difficult subject. Mine was assessment and evaluation. It was one of the subjects that if taught wrongly, can literally suck your soul dry. One of the many reason was that the content in the subject can be rather irrelevant and complex. Thus, it is necessary to teach it in a way that is fun and engaging.
However, the most important lesson of all was that to learn, it has to be learning. Similar to dealing with cars, the knowledge did not matter at all if I had a new car. If everything worked well for my car, I would not have to learn to change the oil, disconnect the car battery and even bother looking for a mechanic. Knowledge has to be relevant in order to get the students to learn.
I always try to make learning relevant to my students. I teach quantitative research by getting students to evaluate the best coffee or fast food in town. I teach experimental studies in research by relating it to my failed relationships in the past. The reason why this helps is because learning complex concepts only work when it is built upon someone's prior knowledge.
Conclusion
There may come a day where the current method of sit-down classrooms become irrelevant. We try to jam as much information, homework and tasks into the student that it becomes counterproductive. With students' attention span becoming shorter and shorter, it is no wonder that many are not learning as well anymore.
The curriculum or at least the methods of teaching should change in order to keep up. One of the many ways to make that happen however, is to change exams, the curriculum and the system to better mirror its real world application. Maybe then, perhaps we would remember the algebra that we all have learnt in school.