The Challenges of Teaching - Part 1

Steph and I have been here in the Philippines for about five months. Most of our time is spent teaching, planning or marking. It sounds very dull, but so far I am, most of the time, not finding it so. I am finding the challenge of teaching quite exciting.

Our students spend most of their time studying technical subjects the three courses offered here are: Mechanical Technology; Industrial Electricity; and Wood and Furniture Technology. All three of these courses require the students to know and be able to use quite a bit of maths.

The students we teach are not academic high fliers, all of them come from poor backgrounds and most of them have suffered due to the substandard public education provision. In the government schools classes are very large and teachers often not as qualified as they need to be. 95% of Filippino children attend publically funded schools (In England it is 93% although much higher outside the Southeast), but it is the privately educated 5% who inevitably end up with all the political power (sound familiar?), hence because the system has worked for them there is little thirst for a change among the ruling classes.

In order to make up for this lack of prior education the students we teach have to work very hard, with so much to learn and only two hours of maths teaching a week there is no easy option.

One of the big challenges of teaching is to convince the students that they need to practise in order to learn. this is true of all schools everywhere in the world. Part of being young is not being mature enough to see why it is important to work hard and to learn. Perhaps the most important job of any teacher is to help their students to see why they are learning?

Much of the education our students have received before coming to TVED has been essentially learning by rote. A teacher will write up texts on the board which are simply copied down. All that is required to receive a passing grade is to regurgitate this set text in an exam or homework. I am not criticising the teachers who teach this way, how else do you educate enormous classes of 50 plus students?

The problem with this method of teaching is that it doesn’t encourage the students to think. They are used to simply copying and find it hard when they have to work out how to solve problems for themselves. Give them a straight equation

34 × 54 =

and most of them can solve it, but give them something which require them to work out what they have to do and they are lost. Take for example this monthly exam, 65 students sat it and only 10 managed to get to the final answer.

Given homework to do some will do it properly but a large proportion will just find another student from whom to copy. Thus because they don’t practise thinking they don’t learn, and because they don’t learn they are left unable to move forward onto the next more complex stage.

Of course such is the way with students the world over, and I don't delude myself into thinking the same problems don't exist everywhere. I was no doubt the same. Nor is the learning by rote unique to here, I can remember when studying for GCSEs and A-levels that for four years I was being taught to the exam, getting the grades was more important than learning the subject! Knowing what the teacher or examiner thinks a novel means is more important than what you think.

The question and the Challenge is how to inspire them to learn for themselves rather than fall into the all too easy trap of 'teaching by force'. That's what I am trying to work on