Bring fun to the classroom!

By Lie Hua

JAKARTA (JP): Today many schools boast they have a lot of subjects to teach their students. To ignorant parents, this seems promising as they believe their children will be the cleverer, the more subjects are crammed into their brains. Little do these parents suspect that too many subjects will rob their children of the fun of learning.

Learning is fun. Toddlers learn to walk little by little, again and again. They fall, stand up again, fall again. Do they cry? Hardly ever. They smile and grin when experiencing this seemingly boring procedure. Do they learn to walk one step today and two steps tomorrow? They would go down in the Guinness Book of World Records if they did!

Look at them again. What they do today will be repeated almost entirely the next day. This is a repeated process and they never get tired because every time they make slight progress and can maneuver slightly differently from the previous day. In no time, as they proceed naturally, they start to walk.

We all go through such learning before we can walk and speak. It is a very slow process, promising a little progress at a time. There is no need to hurry because when the time comes and we have got enough training, we can walk, run and speak, properly.

At school, a learning process is designed. There is a certain amount of knowledge that must be learned within a certain amount of time. The learners are varied in terms of family background and intelligence level. The learners are not free to learn at their own pace as the learning process involves a number of students in a class. The learners have a teacher. The teacher is supposed to know how much the students must learn at a time so that over a given period, a certain amount of knowledge will be well grasped.

It is here that the teacher assumes a pivotal role. The teacher should have a good grasp of what to teach the students. Knowing and mastering something are two different things. A teacher must also know why the subject is taught to the students. Also, he must know precisely the learning capacity of each student so that he has a good knowledge of the average learning capacity of the class.

A teacher is someone with pedagogical training. He knows the theory and methods of teaching. However, a good teacher must appear as himself before the class. He must forget all the teaching theories while he comes into contact with real people -- children, teenagers or adults.

People are always dynamic. A class will not be the same for several days at a stretch. Teachers often forget that each day, a class is a new entity, although the members are the same. Even on a single day, the class will be in a number of situations because living beings always respond mentally to their surroundings. Fatigue, inability to solve problems, the introduction of new lessons, some comments from the teacher or fellow students, are some reasons why the class cannot remain emotionally unchanged.

Unless a teacher understands the emotions of the class, he will never be able to successfully get across anything to the students. Only bad teachers believe that mere spoon-feeding will be enough to make the students clever or that giving tests as often as possible will be advantageous to them.

Unfortunately, in many a school teachers take pride in assigning a lot of materials to students to study for their tests. And these teachers also take pride in giving as many tests as possible to their students in complete disregard of the students' emotional and intellectual endurance.

Obviously, many teachers today have forgotten how they first learnt to walk or speak. While the modern era demands that every thing be speedily done, learning remains old-fashioned. High speed is taboo but snail's pace is not. In their fondness for fast movement in the modern world, teachers are oblivious to the fact that even today toddlers cannot learn to walk overnight. You can, at least theoretically, build a high-rise building overnight (remember the Berlin Wall?) but no toddler can learn to walk or speak overnight.

It is at this juncture that a curriculum becomes very important. It shows what teaching units for a particular subject must be taught over a certain period of time. It is a guide to show a teacher how far he should go every time. The curriculum is not an end in itself. It is not to be taken as a given. Like a map, it shows what places to visit before a vessel comes to its destination.

Two vessels, for example, might visit different places before they both arrive at the same destination. One might arrive a little earlier than the other, or the other way around. The point is that they arrive at their destination at a given time.

Teachers are also in a similar situation. They must know how much to teach their students every time. As a class is dynamic, it might not take the same amount of knowledge every time. it is the teacher's job to judge how much the right amount is. It is also the teacher's job to decide whether the class is ready for a new amount of knowledge. A good teacher will not blindly follow the curriculum.

A good teacher will always remember how a toddler learns to walk or speak. A little at a time, to be repeated until the class is ready to move on. A good teacher will also always remember that teaching and learning are fun. No brow-knitting is necessary at all. He will know that unless his teaching is enjoyable and entertaining, everything else he does will be a flop.

Unfortunately, too many teachers today are too proud to consider themselves entertainers. They deny their students any fun that teaching can offer. Sadly, therefore, a classroom has too often become a torture chamber of sorts, at least mentally. If our education is to undergo reform, it is this mental attitude that must be on the top priority list; otherwise our schools can turn out only "robots", rather than thinking beings who value education because it gives them fun and knowledge. Fortunately, Mother Nature remains unchanged, otherwise nobody would ever learn to walk or speak properly.

The writer teaches at the English department of the School of Letters at the National University in Jakarta.