What I learned

I have taken some courses about education now and I have always felt like seeing only the tip of the ice berg. Not only am I not seeing the big picture, these small pieces are often partly contradicting, partly corresponding to each other. Here is an example.

 In a class I took online, I was told to use gestures, not words, to teach ESL students. Applying Need Theory, I would argue that students will feel powerless, and therefore unbelonging, in a classroom. Just picture a teacher, his/her lips sewed, hands pressing down, and every single students shut their mouth. This is a classroom where the teacher is the dictator and the students his/her people. Students' need for control and safety are largely unresponded to. Using Type Theory, I would argue that the feeling type learners may take some of these gestures as "silent complaint" to their personal behaviors. The extraverted learners are going to clash with this teaching style badly as their outward flow of energy will be met with a silent hand signal from the teacher.

Does the "gesture" way have no merits? No, as I would argue that it is useful in practice. From my own experience, it works well when your class goes out of control. Even better when you have no other medium of communication. I have had a tutoring class full of students of minority ethnicity. They were lost, damaged, and struggling to survive in a Cantonese-speaking country that does not offer any Chinese-as-a-second-language support to immigrants. They frequently ran away from the mosque in the middle of the class. Talking to them yield little because neither English nor Chinese were effective in communicating to them. To keep them at least in some sort of order without asking the priest of the mosque to help, I used different gestures. My silence and hand signal give them a direct message, and I was rewarded by their compliance. The tutoring classes ended up being a success and I built a strong and friendly relationships with all ten of my students.

Reflecting on my experiece and learning, I have truly come to appreciate teaching as an art. Teaching is so powerful, yet sophisticated, that teachers must always be on their toes for new things as the world changes. More importantly, theory and experiences must be used cautiously because every single classroom has a different context, and I would argue that context is more important than content. As a teacher, I feel like I am better than I was before because I am more accepting to new ideas. For the older generation, it was the internet and online gaming and social media. For this generation, it could be new ways of understanding our "self" and the relationship between our "self" and the world. Since most of us who are living in the "First World" are well-fed, safe and well-educated, the new generation of teachers are asked to teach students to achieve perhaps the self-actualization stage of Maslow hierachy. We as teacher should try to be teaching stage 5, and even stage 6 of moral reasonings. New challenges, such as teaching a green and sustainable life style, are daunting, but I am feeling prepared and ready to face them.