Teachers and learners
VALSA BALAJI
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Joint venture of exploring still needs vital human link
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WHEN I began teaching in the 1980s in India, for my colleagues and me, purple ink stains on our fingers were the sign of a day usefully spent at school. We corrected our students' workbooks, recorded their scores by hand in our grade-sheets and painstakingly averaged these numbers at the end of the term.
I now feel those were the days long ago and far away. Teaching is now a technical marvel of computer labs, projects, multimedia presentations, language labs, web search and the like. Teaching has become a joint venture of learning together between the teacher and the taught, where the teacher is pardonably the slower, yet a winner
One of the most powerful forces changing the roles of teachers and students in education today is the fast expanding vistas of technology. The old model of instruction was predicated on information scarcity. Teachers and their books were information oracles, spreading knowledge and enlightenment to a population with few other ways to acquire it. The world today, in contrast, is inundated with easily accessible information from a multitude of sources.
Today's young are part of an increasingly diverse and mobile society and are living life in an exciting time, with new technologies and myriad opportunities to be informed, educated and entertained. The teacher and the taught are caught up in this milieu of information overload. The role of a teacher in education has undergone a sea change all across the world. From the old "chalk and talk practices," teaching has morphed to inspiring children develop their abilities to think critically and creatively to benefit society.
Changing roles
The day-to-day job of a teacher is more than broadcasting content. It is about crafting the content and guiding the children through engaging learning opportunities. An educator's most important responsibility is to search out and construct meaningful educational experiences that equip the learners to think big and solve real-world problems.
The essence of education is a close relationship between a knowledgeable, caring adult and a secure, motivated child. The teacher's primary task is to get to know the learner as an individual in order to comprehend his unique needs. Their job is essentially about counselling the learners towards integrating their social, emotional and intellectual growth.
Children are naturally more adept at complex problem solving activities than just memorising facts. They enjoy teamwork and group interaction and naturally assume leadership positions in their own niche areas. Their almost unlimited analytical ability and their natural capacity for teamwork and leadership roles are the facets that need to be nurtured and expanded, while their natural and limited memory space gets augmented artificially into digital discs.
Even though we are now living in the digital age that is gushing with information and dizzying possibilities, the basic and most important element of education — the human connection — has not changed. The most wired students still need that one-on-one teacher-student relationship to learn and to succeed.
Teenagers need classroom instruction, but they also want personal advice and encouragement. They rely on compassionate teachers to guide, to tutor, to listen, to laugh and to cry with them. This is the vital human link in the educational process that no amount of technology can improve upon or substitute.
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