Youth at School
Lately, when we hear the word education, it is often accompanied by the now famous word,inclusion. There are many on-going discussions concerning how inclusion works and how far inclusion can be taken. Of course, children with a disability or learning difficulty spring to mind when we first hear the word. The trend is now to try to integrate these children into normal classes. Some people agree with this whilst others do not. This is not the kind of inclusion I shall be discussing in this article. My concern, here, is the inclusion of what we consider to be the "normal", average student.
We are all different, and thus we learn and perceive things in different ways and manners but unfortunately teachers, including myself, have their own teaching methods, to which they must stick because of the infamous curriculum. There is not only a lot of material which must be covered, but actually too much (to do to satisfy the curriculum) in the time available. When preparing lessons teachers have to keep in mind all the administration work, the days that are "lost "because of Drama projects, Sports Day and Christmas preparations, parties, outings etc. These make up a total of 18% of the total lesson-time. By no means am I saying that these are useless, but it is a fact that teachers must keep them in mind while preparing a schedule of lessons designed to include everything that is in the curriculum.
Teachers embark on their teaching experience with a truck-load of innovative ideas and hours of research on how to make lessons more appealing and interesting - with games, quizzes, charts and all sorts of other interesting teaching aids. By the second week they usually realise that this is not going to work and that they have to pick up the book, get on with the reading and rush through the lesson, giving students a lot of homework which must be corrected at unearthly hours. Before they know it, teachers have metamorphosed into the very kind of people they hated when they were students!
Ultimately it's a job to be done, for which they get paid and that is the end of it. But how is this affecting students? (Form 1 + in my case)
To make a long story short the above system will be useful only to students who are lucky enough to be compatible with the teacher’s system - no more, no less. The fact is that inclusion goes beyond catering for persons having learning disabilities. Inclusion should also be applied to students who learn more efficiently through means other than those usually used in order to catch up with fixed curricula. At the moment, teachers feel that they don’t have time to allow students to participate in lessons by allowing them to give presentations, or indeed to try out different methods of delivering the lesson so as to help certain students absorb the subject better.
History teachers find that they do not have the time to actually take students on outings to view a couple of places they are learning about, Chemistry teachers don’t have time to do fun experiments apart from the ones the students really need to do in order to pass exams, Art teachers don’t get to take students out to exhibitions or to the theatre - and the list just keeps going on and on and on. This is not only the case with secondary schools. Even our University works this way. We do not have the culture of thinking outside the box. Students should be given the opportunity to experiment, and to teach and learn from each other.
How many times does one hear people, those who are teachers and those who are not, comment about the fact (and it is a fact) that students are not interested in the lessons , but rather in the pranks that they do, and that they don’t pay attention? When people complain in this way, they seem to forget that young people have an innate instinct to find things out and learn. They are inherently curious. They hunger for knowledge. The secret, in act, lies in stimulating them to do this, to want to find things out. If this does not happen all can be lost! Unfortunately, our system and culture concentrates, rather, on feeding students information which must be learnt instead of stimulating them to find things out for themselves. Children with a particular patterns of learning are therefore favoured over those who have different learning patterns.
One would, no doubt, have noticed that when foreign children are interviewed on TV, they answer questions in the most natural way, as if they are speaking to their own mother? One often hears comments in the sense that Maltese children are not as spontaneous in the same situation. The pity is that we have only our education system to think. It is a system which does not give students the opportunity to think outside the limitations we instil into their minds. Our system is so unspontaneous that it does not breed spontaneity: as soon as students are something in a different way, or in a different context, they are lost.
The bottom line is that, yes, young people do want to learn - not only because they have to, but because they want to. They do want to get involved in societyand they do want to organise themselves and be the best they can possibly be, but until they are given the possibility to do so and the tools to do it, thus empowering them, then they are not going to be able to achieve their utmost and the result will be frustration and discouragment, couple with the feeling that it is useless for them to try.
Lately, when we hear the word education, it is often accompanied by the now famous word,inclusion. There are many on-going discussions concerning how inclusion works and how far inclusion can be taken. Of course, children with a disability or learning difficulty spring to mind when we first hear the word. The trend is now to try to integrate these children into normal classes. Some people agree with this whilst others do not. This is not the kind of inclusion I shall be discussing in this article. My concern, here, is the inclusion of what we consider to be the "normal", average student.
We are all different, and thus we learn and perceive things in different ways and manners but unfortunately teachers, including myself, have their own teaching methods, to which they must stick because of the infamous curriculum. There is not only a lot of material which must be covered, but actually too much (to do to satisfy the curriculum) in the time available. When preparing lessons teachers have to keep in mind all the administration work, the days that are "lost "because of Drama projects, Sports Day and Christmas preparations, parties, outings etc. These make up a total of 18% of the total lesson-time. By no means am I saying that these are useless, but it is a fact that teachers must keep them in mind while preparing a schedule of lessons designed to include everything that is in the curriculum.
Teachers embark on their teaching experience with a truck-load of innovative ideas and hours of research on how to make lessons more appealing and interesting - with games, quizzes, charts and all sorts of other interesting teaching aids. By the second week they usually realise that this is not going to work and that they have to pick up the book, get on with the reading and rush through the lesson, giving students a lot of homework which must be corrected at unearthly hours. Before they know it, teachers have metamorphosed into the very kind of people they hated when they were students!
Ultimately it's a job to be done, for which they get paid and that is the end of it. But how is this affecting students? (Form 1 + in my case)
To make a long story short the above system will be useful only to students who are lucky enough to be compatible with the teacher’s system - no more, no less. The fact is that inclusion goes beyond catering for persons having learning disabilities. Inclusion should also be applied to students who learn more efficiently through means other than those usually used in order to catch up with fixed curricula. At the moment, teachers feel that they don’t have time to allow students to participate in lessons by allowing them to give presentations, or indeed to try out different methods of delivering the lesson so as to help certain students absorb the subject better.
History teachers find that they do not have the time to actually take students on outings to view a couple of places they are learning about, Chemistry teachers don’t have time to do fun experiments apart from the ones the students really need to do in order to pass exams, Art teachers don’t get to take students out to exhibitions or to the theatre - and the list just keeps going on and on and on. This is not only the case with secondary schools. Even our University works this way. We do not have the culture of thinking outside the box. Students should be given the opportunity to experiment, and to teach and learn from each other.
How many times does one hear people, those who are teachers and those who are not, comment about the fact (and it is a fact) that students are not interested in the lessons , but rather in the pranks that they do, and that they don’t pay attention? When people complain in this way, they seem to forget that young people have an innate instinct to find things out and learn. They are inherently curious. They hunger for knowledge. The secret, in act, lies in stimulating them to do this, to want to find things out. If this does not happen all can be lost! Unfortunately, our system and culture concentrates, rather, on feeding students information which must be learnt instead of stimulating them to find things out for themselves. Children with a particular patterns of learning are therefore favoured over those who have different learning patterns.
One would, no doubt, have noticed that when foreign children are interviewed on TV, they answer questions in the most natural way, as if they are speaking to their own mother? One often hears comments in the sense that Maltese children are not as spontaneous in the same situation. The pity is that we have only our education system to think. It is a system which does not give students the opportunity to think outside the limitations we instil into their minds. Our system is so unspontaneous that it does not breed spontaneity: as soon as students are something in a different way, or in a different context, they are lost.
The bottom line is that, yes, young people do want to learn - not only because they have to, but because they want to. They do want to get involved in societyand they do want to organise themselves and be the best they can possibly be, but until they are given the possibility to do so and the tools to do it, thus empowering them, then they are not going to be able to achieve their utmost and the result will be frustration and discouragment, couple with the feeling that it is useless for them to try.
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