Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Reflection Paper - Teaching Profession
Leonardo
Z. Camboja Jr.
BEE-2
November
19, 2012, MWF – 5:30 – 6:30 PM
Dr. Olga
C. Alonsabe, Ph.D.
Reflection
Paper – Teaching Profession
The
teacher’s personality should be pleasantly live and attractive. This does not
rule out people who are physically plain, or even ugly, because many such have
great personal charm. But it does rule out such types as the over-excitable,
melancholy, frigid, sarcastic, cynical, frustrated, and over-bearing : I would
say too, that it excludes all of dull or purely negative personality. I still
stick to what I said in my earlier book: that school children probably ‘suffer
more from bores than from brutes’. It is not merely desirable but essential for
a teacher to have a genuine capacity for sympathy – in the literal meaning of
that word; a capacity to tune in to the minds and feelings of other people,
especially, since most teachers are school teachers, to the minds and feelings
of children. Closely related with this is the capacity to be tolerant – not,
indeed, of what is wrong, but of the frailty and immaturity of human nature
which induce people, and again especially children, to make mistakes. I hold it
essential for a teacher to be both intellectually and morally honest. This does
not mean being a plaster saint. It means that he will be aware of his
intellectual strengths, and limitations, and will have thought about and
decided upon the moral principles by which his life shall be guided. There is
no contradiction in my going on to say that a teacher should be a bit of an
actor. That is part of the technique of teaching, which demands that every now
and then a teacher should be able to put on an act – to enliven a lesson,
correct a fault, or award praise. Children, especially young children, live in
a world that is rather larger than life.
A teacher must remain mentally
alert. He will not get into the profession if of low intelligence, but it is
all too easy, even for people of above-average intelligence, to stagnate
intellectually – and that means to deteriorate intellectually. A teacher must
be quick to adapt himself to any situation, however improbable and able to
improvise, if necessary at less than a moment’s notice. On the other hand, a
teacher must be capable of infinite patience. This, I may say, is largely a
matter of self-discipline and self-training; we are none of us born like that.
He must be pretty resilient; teaching makes great demands on nervous energy.
And he should be able to take in his stride the innumerable petty irritations
any adult dealing with children has to endure.
If I’ll become a teacher someday,
I would have the kind of mind which always wants to go on learning. Teaching is
a job at which one will never be perfect; there is always something more to
learn about it. There are three principal objects of study: the subject, or
subjects, which the teacher is teaching; the methods by which they can best be
taught to the particular pupils in the classes he is teaching; and – by far the
most important – the children, young people, or adults to whom they are to be
taught. According to the two cardinal principles of British education today are
that; "education is education of the whole person, and that it is best acquired
through full and active co-operation between two persons, the teacher and the
learner."
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