Fine Art of the Teaching Profession

By Hu Wo (Cuckoo’s Song)

 

 

In the real world, vocational professions are springing up like mushrooms. Everybody must have got at least one profession to earn their living with no worry. But here, some would like to go into teaching school as a dream job very strangely rather than other professions. In actual fact, the teaching profession is a kind of fine art as well as one of the noblest jobs, especially in accordance with Myanmar religious beliefs. Being able to make an artistic living as a qualified teacher requires, first of all, mastering academic and educational subjects. Most inexperienced teachers may, in all honesty, find it easy to enter the teaching profession; of course, that profession is more difficult than most thought. And other people who are not teachers like to speculate that the teaching occupation would not cost too much money for the teacher. In practice, teachers tend to lavish most of their attention, hard work, time, and even expensive materials on the teaching process with the best intentions. I have been teaching part-time for several years. Thus, this article will form the basis for my part-time teaching experience.
Many young learners frequently assume their teachers to know anything great and small like a mine of information or an all-rounder. What I mean is that those learners expect they should ask their respective teachers whatever they want to know. In this connection, teachers should have known their major subjects inside out. After all, this assumption has direct relevance to a teacher’s academic subject mastery. Personally, the term `subject mastery´ means that a teacher knows any subject like the back of his hand, and such this mastery could be up to standard for the only subject, but probably no more. Plus, a teacher’s higher educational levels often play a critical role in the matter of subject mastery, where it would be better if that degree is more advanced than the learners’. Provided that the teacher has done a high degree whenever possible, he will most likely point out the future route to higher education to elementary learners. Also, subject mastery vitally involves seeing the nature of a subject very well, in which all subjects of diverse fields

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After the mastery of an academic subject, a teacher needs to know his stuff in the three educational subjects to a wide extent: Educational Theory, Educational Psychology, and Methodology.  ILLUSTRATION: FOR REPRESENTATIONAL PURPOSE ONLY/FREEPIK

can be generally categorized as arts and sciences. Arts subjects like Myanmar and English are foremost based on divergent thinking and imagination, whereas science subjects such as Mathematics and Physics are chiefly grounded in practicals, facts and figures. So, arts subjects entail an enormous amount of book reading and discussion while science subjects demand quite a lot of laboratory experiments and tests in order to arrive at subject-related aims and goals for certain. Perhaps subject mastery is the first step towards a highly confident and competent teacher in consequence.
After the mastery of an academic subject, a teacher needs to know his stuff in the three educational subjects to a wide extent: Educational Theory, Educational Psychology, and Methodology. Firstly, Educational Theory exerts a strong influence on all persons in the world of education – educational policymakers, curriculum developers, headmasters, and teachers. This educational subject also studies three types of education: formal education, informal education, and non-formal education. Formal education can be systematically obtained through schooling, private educational sectors, or university education; informal education may be done unconsciously from free literary talks or whatever; and non-formal education is consciously achieved with the help of non-government courses or tuition. The teacher himself needs to take up the other two types of education besides formal education for his professional and referenced powers. The advantages and limitations of each type of education notwithstanding, he must be able to advise his learners to pursue all types of education for their conceptual, inspirational, mental, and emotional well-being in advance, too. Furthermore, Educational Theory is closely linked to educational management and administration including school infrastructure, setting and seating arrangements, a lunch programme, etc. When a teacher gives instruction in any subject to learners, he will certainly have to think about a teaching space. An average classroom holds only 25 students with an area which is well-lit, well-ventilated, and broad to the extent that learning activities can be done smoothly and efficiently, to the best of my knowledge. Next, the subject relates to philosophy, in which the term `philosophy´ denotes the love of wisdom. By and large, the philosophy of education is accepted to mainly comprise four beliefs – idealism, realism, pragmatism, and existentialism. Without theory, practice is blind or vice versa.
Secondly, Educational Psychology is connected with the study of a learner’s mental and emotional traits due to his age, especially interpreting his apparent physical behaviours scientifically. These psychological traits contain the intelligence, memory, forgetting, emotion, and motivation of a learner. In my experience, schoolgirls have higher linguistic intelligence than schoolboys. Still, schoolboys possess better mathematical intelligence than schoolgirls, even though both of the above-mentioned intelligence are working just on the left-hand side of the brain. Then, good care should be taken whether a learner has got a short or long memory. It does not matter to learners with long-term memory. On the other hand, short-term memories not only rely upon an interest in studies but also call for learning by repetition. Besides, memory is sometimes interrupted by forgetting that will be caused by proactive or retroactive inhibition, too. For instance, not being able to memorize something new well owing to something old is a form of proactive inhibition and not being able to recall something old on account of something new is a variety of retroactive inhibition. It is only human nature to forget after learning new things. Deep learning and frequent practice will manage to get over the retarded process of forgetting. As regards emotions, they are two types: positive emotions like smiling or laughing and negative emotions such as seeing red or crying. Before a learning process, every individual learner had better express their physical, mental, and emotional readiness. Learners’ intrinsic motivations and teachers’ extrinsic motivations must be considered carefully in Educational Psychology as well. A student’s lifelong ambition usually becomes his best intrinsic motivation and the legitimate power, reward power, and coercive power of a teacher turn out to be his greatest extrinsic motivations for learners. All teachers will be able to keep healthy classroom control over learners in addition to their emotional control and maturity whenever they need it if they are an expert in child psychology.
Lastly, Methodology gives rise to a wide variety of methods on the teaching ground. Numerous teachers like following traditional methods of teaching as their old teachers did to start with. They too find it convenient to apply these methods, to a certain degree. Afterwards, they are going to lust for trying alternative or modern methods of teaching if need be. One of the prominent traditional teaching methods is lecture-discussion, also a teacher-centred approach to lessons, which must still be employed by today’s teachers, particularly university teachers. The second mode of pedagogy is content-focused teaching which is dependent on instructing according to the nature of a subject. To my certain knowledge, modern teachers are getting to prefer the process of learning by doing to traditional teaching methods these days. In that connection, they put songs, mnemonics, creative games, crosswords, puzzles, and other learning activities in their teaching process seeing that children will learn better if they do learn all by themselves, most notably in contact with real-life situations. What is more, a teacher may conduct any one or all of the assessments _ diagnostic, formative, and summative _ before, while, and after teaching respectively. Questioning skills play a key role in the teacher’s instruction. A good question can have direct relevance to teaching lessons and will bring about critical or logical thinking for convergent or divergent thoughts; questioner teachers need to have found right or possible answers ahead.
As shown above, the teaching profession is a fine art in that a teacher ought to take various roles in the art of teaching. Speaking as a pupil, teaching all the time is so boring that even advanced learners would get sleepy during the lecture very quickly. Consequently, the teacher should make his learning environment amusing and enjoyable through humour, suspense, or any strong feeling. His sense of humour and suspense possibly comes from his life experiences or intensive and extensive reading. In other words, merely his knowledge of the subject matter in textbooks is almost impossible to be enough for an accomplished teacher. Therefore, teachers should read as many sorts of books as they can afford. As my best friend Saya Aye said, it has come to my knowledge that elementary learners are fond of listening to ghost stories and the supernatural. Only if learners show an interest in the teacher’s instruction can it be said that his instructional process has been successful. Not only that, providing the learners think their studies are essential for them indeed, their educational achievement will have flown high. Now that teachers are learners’ role models, their styles of talking, wearing, and staying are willingly imitated by the learners. Hence, teachers must wear their school uniforms for duty, respect, love, and unity, at the very least. Tests and measurements are likewise of great importance, relating to the dignity of a teacher. Basically, there can be divided into three types of tests: written, oral, and practical. Students’ exam nerves or test anxiety, guessing ability and bluffing should be taken into account as far as tests and examinations are concerned. Excellent tests must consist of at least three qualities, viz. course coverage, reliability, and validity. More importantly, teachers will by no means let on tests to any learner until the examination days.
The art-like teaching profession is becoming deep and broad more often nowadays. By making effective use of a tool called language, teachers can explain everything that they instruct simply and clearly. They should also make eye contact with each learner in the class so as to avoid paying attention to the only one or looking somewhere else. That eye contact may tell them whether or not their learners have an interest in what they will say, are saying or said. Moreover, the teacher must not be standing inactive as a marble statue in front of the class. He has to go around the whole class with suitable facial expressions, overcoming language barriers and behavioural issues as best he can. When absolutely necessary, he must be able to recite poems off the cuff and sing songs in a good voice. Above and beyond, a well-prepared lesson plan is a teacher’s life anytime. If any teacher believes that his teaching methods have been flawless and adequate for both him and his learners, he will necessarily be the best failure as a teacher in the future. Additionally, a person who wishes to be an authority on the teaching profession must have in-depth studied Bloom’s Taxonomy of Classification, Piaget’s Cognitive Theory, Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Maslow’s Theory of Hierarchical Needs, James Marcia’s Identity Statuses, and Vytogsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. May the teaching profession be this article reader’s success.

 

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