During my early school days, there were these popular set of debate topics that were rampant for years even after leaving primary school and these topics were loved by many as well. These topics focused mainly on the importance of teachers in the world and the impact that teachers had on young minds.
Some examples of these topics include the following:
A TEACHER IS BETTER THAN A DOCTOR?
A TEACHER IS BETTER THAN A FARMER?, and so on..
I'm sure some of us are familiar with these topics.
There were other debate topics that also related to the teaching profession but from another angle like:
IS EDUCATION A SCAM?
And so on..
All these topics served to explain and defend the purpose of teachers in the world and the role they play in the lives of students. The school is the second place a child gets trained after receiving training from the home and as it is, children spend most of their day in school under the supervision of the teacher whose duty it is to impact knowledge and see to the proper upbringing of the students.
In every class, there are always students who seem to be behind in every academic activity and those students are usually looked down upon by their peers and unfortunately by the teachers too. They are ignored and neglected by the teachers who are supposed to pay extra attention to them because they really need it more than the students that assimilate quickly.
If a student were to be slow in learning thereby leading to poor performance in class activity, it doesn't mean that it is the student's fault or the teacher's fault. It is not the student's fault because everyone has that particular subject that they always find difficult and it is not the teacher's fault because it's a thing to be expected in young minds.
It becomes the teacher's fault if a student who is obviously struggling to catch up with the rest of the class is left to struggle alone. I believe that it is the duty of the teacher to take note of each and every student in the classroom and observe the mental capacity of each one of them. That way, the teacher would be able to tell who needs extra attention and extra lessons if need be.
When I was in secondary school a lot of my classmates hated the subject Further Mathematics for two major reasons:
- We didn't understand why we had to learn the further version of mathematics as art students and..
- The teacher who claimed to be a teacher was a horrible person.
I, on the other hand, disliked both Mathematics and Further Mathematics because I wasn't really swift at calculating numbers and the teacher was always impatient with us when teaching in class and also swift when failing the whole class during exams and you already know why I and my classmates disliked Further Mathematics.
At the end of every term, I would have good grades in other subjects but Mathematics and Further Mathematics would just ruin my result and it would just make me angry. I was angry because I knew that I could actually get to like mathematics if I was taught properly but the teachers were not helpful and so a bunch of us continually performed poorly in the subject while a very tiny percentage of the class actually did well.
The teachers only focused on that tiny percentage.
It was really frustrating.
Things began to look up in SS3 when the teachers got replaced and an actual teacher was employed to take both subjects though by then I had dropped further mathematics. When the new teacher began to teach us topics like calculus and algebra and all those topics that we found confusing, he was really patient with us. He even organized an after school lesson for those who still had difficulty understanding various topics in mathematics and further mathematics and the class began to improve from that very moment.
I even began to look forward to the days we would have mathematics just so I could rack my brain while solving equations and crunching numbers.
All we needed was the right teacher who knew what it was to teach and who understood that all heads are different instead of picking a select few and focusing on them only in the class making the rest seem like fools for not understanding even the simplest of equations.
Image is mine..