I believe that is critical for students to receive compassion from their educators, at least to a certain limit. Too much compassion will take away from the students learning because they will be able to slack off. Too little compassion and it the classroom will become a military boot camp and the students will not enjoy the learning experience. For a teacher to show compassion, they must be aware of how their teaching is affecting their individual students, not just the class as a whole. However, the teacher still needs to be able to challenge the students to the full level of their abilities.
The first teacher that comes to mind when I think of compassion is Lombo. He was a high school teacher of mine. I had missed a few days of class due to illness and he took time out of his busy schedule to bring me up to speed. He was very aware of how fast I was learning the material and sympathetic and understanding about the parts I had questions on. He would give me difficult problems to try and guide me through them without giving me the answer. This pushed me to think more and grasp the concept even better. In a few days I had made up more the same amount of material that the class had done the past week.
It was great to have a teacher treat me the way he did. I learned the material faster than I would have in class normally because of the devotion and compassion he showed me when he worked on a one-to-one basis.
If more teachers were aware of where each student was in their class, then they would be able to help that student more or less, whether to push them more or not. This would drastically improve the knowledge of each student and quite possibly their motivation to learn. When someone cares about what someone is doing, inside or outside of school, their strive and motivation to continue that work and do a good job excels. Lombo gave me this opportunity and I am very thankful for him doing so.
No comments:
Post a Comment