Articles about creativity and invention
If I am a teacher...........
Are we having great difficulty in teaching our children now that their young minds have been adversely shaped by the internet? Yes, we do have a problem indeed. Young pupils are now more knowledgeable than their teachers! Just ask any six year old about those cartoon characters and they will tell you all about it and if you ask their teachers, most will have difficulty answering. For the young ones, cartoons and animation characters are all that occupied their mind. They get it on the TV and they get more of it on computers. Yet when they attend school, the teachers don’t have lessons structured on animation techniques to offer the pupils. And we all know it is the best time to mold the character of the child at this age. Often enough, teachers are ill equipped to teach internet savvy kids as they were trained with per-internet methodologies.
There should be an intensive teacher retraining program (especially for those who teach the under seven years old) going on but unfortunately, there is a lag of urgency on the part of the authorities. What can you expect when the students are more knowledgeable than the teachers where animations are concerned! This will certainly bore the pupils who had more interesting exposures from the computer. If you were to observe a child engrossing themselves in computer games, then you would have noticed that they are hooked on it. Future school lessons should make use of this reality to redesign their lessons to incorporate these multi-media centric methods to sustain the child's interest in school lessons. Perhaps, teaching methodology should go for a paradigm shift. If I am a teacher, I would have proposed it many years ago.
Apart from using more dynamic visual systems to deliver their lessons, teachers should be able to deliver individually customized lessons to their pupils as each one of them has different learning capabilities. Software can be designed for teachers to track each individual pupil's learning abilities, thus customized lessons can be structured to cater to individual student's needs. However smart can software become, teachers will still have to use their capabilities to observe correctly the pupil's abilities as mistakes made will adversely affect the child's learning abilities. With the new teaching methods, those who teach a child below the age of seven will have to be highly trained because it is the most critical stage. The most critical time for shaping the child's learning is when they are below seven years old, after which most of their characters will already have been solidified and nothing much can change them. If they ere, the consequences will be dire, so their salaries would have to be higher to reflect on the higher responsibilities.
This would also be another paradigm shift for the education system, and one that should had been addressed earlier. In order to help mold the young underlings in a proper manner, teachers should have basic knowledge of child psychology. They must also understand how various multi-media techniques affect the children's mind. In this respect, more studies should be made to find out the effects of animation techniques on the mind. As teachers have to devise new teaching modules fast, they will have to pool their resources to bring about tested methodologies. Perhaps they can utilize Web 2 techniques to amass effective methods in double quick time! If I am a teacher, I would like to participate in such programs, rather than spending my time with the other networking that can't bring much benefits.
Another area that needs a closer look is the communication channel between the teacher and the pupil. You normally have a twelve hour break of communication when the pupil leaves for home after school hours. In ancient times, the teacher and the pupil normally live together and teaching is a full time affair. Philosophical, theological and martial art students have these types of regimes and you find that the teacher-pupil relationship is strongly bonded, quiet unlike the modern ones that look like quickie marriages. Fortunately with the advent of computers and real time communication technologies, it is now possible to re-bond back the close relationship between the teacher and the pupil, such that even after school hours, communication is possible. This is especially important where parents are tied up with their day jobs and who are not available to mind their kids (those under seven) after school hours. With the availability of view cameras and advance cell phone functions, pupils should be able to access their teachers for guidance even after school hours. The teachers will also be able to keep a tab on their pupils, so giving working parents a great relieve. Indeed, we are in need of a revolution in teaching methods since the advent of the internet age. Do you see it happening in your area? If I have a teacher's job, I would have changed the system many years ago!
Writen by Terry