Imagine one day you sit in a class where you have to sit down infront of the teacher or lecturer, staring at him for hours, trying to figure out what he is trying to say. You are pounded by rapid sentences from his mouth that never seems to end. All the sudden, your vision is blur and you start to keep those heavy eye lids from closing. You start to take a blink, a longgggggggg blink and suddenly you find yourself drifting into a blissful sleep.
Is that your typical day in school or a workshop?
Why does it seem that those who are teaching or conducting workshops not engaging us in a certain level of participation? Isn't it their job to make things exciting so that people can learn better or more? Is it their responsibility or should it be ours because we need to learn? My answer is simply all parties need to take responsibility. Let me explain...
Teachers need to engage their students in their lessons, stimulating interests as well as providing content. Can you remember the previous time you did well in a particular subject was because your teacher was clear in presenting concepts and made you really like the subject? Students on the other hand need to take personal responsibility to learn well. If we keep blaming teachers on their inability to teach, we have just committed ourselves to academic suicide. If we make another person responsible for teaching us, then we have not learn to be independent in our learning and will struggle very hard when most things in life are not taught in the classrooms but from life's lessons.
The magic question is "How do we stimulate interest?"
Let me approach this from a simplistic point of view- What makes something fun? If you can answer this, interest in a particular subject will naturally come. Let me give you an example, in the university, we were competing in a design competition where we had to design side car mirrors. At the end of the term, we had to present our ideas to a car making company and urge them to take it up. The Lecturer was good enough to allow us to come out with simply outrageous ways of designing the mirrors.
First, the groups studied the actual gears and motors needed to turn the mirrors. After that, we tried all different ways to do so, ranging from giving a mouse cheese to run on a treadill, using push buttons for controls, heating coils to move mirrors and so on. Even the presentation itself was funny, you could actually see people wearing similar wigs or people painted their faces to look like clowns. There was also a home video on guy who does does not seem to be distracted by beautiful woman walking past him but in the end he was so distracted by looking at the car mirror that he nearly got into an accident. Imagine all the presentation was done infront of company executives and we were actually assessed for our final marks!
The lesson from this is that the lecturer created an environment that really made us enjoy as well as learn about automotive parts. If we need to teach something, let us teach with creativity and excitement.
A teacher has not taught until a student has learnt
