I have a bunch of students whom I teach Math, Chemistry and Physics in the evenings for around two hours to three hours everyday. I try as much as possible to make learning interesting to them. I hate losing their attention and try as much as possible to make things fun and try to spark a genuine interest in whatever they do, try to make them participate actively. I go back to the very basics when I deal with a concept and give them real life examples, so they relate to whatever they study. Well I basically do this so that I don't lose them when I am doing something important. But I see that these tidbits make them remember these concepts really well. Sometimes I find that they manage to remember the stories and examples but forget the concept till I go over it again.
This meant that I had to go through the same stuff twice. This really made things drag a little and I cannot afford to spend more time on them, for the fear that I may have leave here soon and might not get to complete their syllabus soon enough. So I found myself getting bogged down and lost the motivation to teach them. To add to the woes the kids skipped classes because they kept falling sick. So I kept putting off teaching things till they were here in full strength. This helped drag things further.
Today I felt miserable about everything and did not want to start teaching at all. So I just sat down and asked them to go over what I had done yesterday to this kid who had not come for this class. This was a chapter on Ray optics. It had me hating it when I studied it and didn't want them to feel that way too. I remembered that this subject formed the base for many other subjects and I had had problems with them too. So I filled my talk with more examples than usual and was relieved to find that the hatred was not transferred.
Now I listened quietly as these kids taught the other one about the stuff she had missed. They didn't know that I was listening and blabbed freely. I was so struck by the fact that they followed the text and gave the exact examples that I gave, used my gestures and diagrams-in-the-air thing that I do! It felt great to see how well they were able to remember all this complicated stuff about spherical mirrors and that totally incomprehensible stuff about real and virtual images(that had me stumped when I studied them in school!) I felt really pleased about this and decided to use this method of getting them to study.
After a while we were discussing "erect" and "inverted" images and I told them about how we appear upside down in a spoon. They absolutely refused to accept what I said and laughed it off. They thought I was just joking and kept laughing. I rummaged in the kitchen to find a shiny new spoon and thrust it in their hands. They laughed till they cried and had a lot of fun. And I know that it is one thing that they will never ever forget. I wish I could surprise them and keep them in awe of science that way. It is a sure way to keep them interested in it when their textbooks seem to be bent upon trying to get them to hate science.
Getting to the point, those of you who hate my long "stories" I will get down to
The moral of the story: -
1) Must use lots of examples from real life.
2) Try to get them to discuss the lessons learnt earlier, a day later,
4) Summarizing a lesson in the end does a lot of good. It even gets their thinking organized.
My experiments involve a very small number of children and I don't know how well they will work in a large class. I wish some 'real' teacher could tell me if these ideas work.
From teaching these kids I even come to understand that if they are taught science in English, they can understand the subject really well even if they are not good at the language( provided the teacher does not try to offer literal translations in the local language and provided speech is accompanied by appropriate gestures and diagrams.) This has made my belief - that children can be taught in English irrespective of their local or mother tongue - stronger.
This meant that I had to go through the same stuff twice. This really made things drag a little and I cannot afford to spend more time on them, for the fear that I may have leave here soon and might not get to complete their syllabus soon enough. So I found myself getting bogged down and lost the motivation to teach them. To add to the woes the kids skipped classes because they kept falling sick. So I kept putting off teaching things till they were here in full strength. This helped drag things further.
Today I felt miserable about everything and did not want to start teaching at all. So I just sat down and asked them to go over what I had done yesterday to this kid who had not come for this class. This was a chapter on Ray optics. It had me hating it when I studied it and didn't want them to feel that way too. I remembered that this subject formed the base for many other subjects and I had had problems with them too. So I filled my talk with more examples than usual and was relieved to find that the hatred was not transferred.
Now I listened quietly as these kids taught the other one about the stuff she had missed. They didn't know that I was listening and blabbed freely. I was so struck by the fact that they followed the text and gave the exact examples that I gave, used my gestures and diagrams-in-the-air thing that I do! It felt great to see how well they were able to remember all this complicated stuff about spherical mirrors and that totally incomprehensible stuff about real and virtual images(that had me stumped when I studied them in school!) I felt really pleased about this and decided to use this method of getting them to study.
After a while we were discussing "erect" and "inverted" images and I told them about how we appear upside down in a spoon. They absolutely refused to accept what I said and laughed it off. They thought I was just joking and kept laughing. I rummaged in the kitchen to find a shiny new spoon and thrust it in their hands. They laughed till they cried and had a lot of fun. And I know that it is one thing that they will never ever forget. I wish I could surprise them and keep them in awe of science that way. It is a sure way to keep them interested in it when their textbooks seem to be bent upon trying to get them to hate science.
Getting to the point, those of you who hate my long "stories" I will get down to
The moral of the story: -
1) Must use lots of examples from real life.
2) Try to get them to discuss the lessons learnt earlier, a day later,
- this lets them get warmed up before a new lesson,
- gets the matter really into their minds
- and this is also a means for the teacher to find out whether or not they have understood the concept.
4) Summarizing a lesson in the end does a lot of good. It even gets their thinking organized.
My experiments involve a very small number of children and I don't know how well they will work in a large class. I wish some 'real' teacher could tell me if these ideas work.
From teaching these kids I even come to understand that if they are taught science in English, they can understand the subject really well even if they are not good at the language( provided the teacher does not try to offer literal translations in the local language and provided speech is accompanied by appropriate gestures and diagrams.) This has made my belief - that children can be taught in English irrespective of their local or mother tongue - stronger.
1 comment:
Nice one..same experience with me too... and the solutions given are very effective
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