Saturday, February 8, 2014

Embracing our Frustrations



Everyone is aware of things that frustrate us in our professional lives. It may be a skill that we find particularly challenging. While my other teacher colleagues find this task easy, I often regarded this as an issue. It may also be an issue that we regard as extremely important like meeting of deadlines, while others don’t approach as enthusiastically as we might like. It may even be a difficult teacher with whom there is a strong difference of opinion that even simple chit-chat becomes a tiring task.

As an introvert, I find public speaking something not so easy – many a time frustrating. Just as I had identified this skill as my greatest frustration, I decided at the beginning of the year to find some way in which my work actually can benefit from this “often-maddening” relationship. In other words, I kept telling myself that this is “THE SKILL” that I have the most opportunity to master no matter what. And through reexamining of my SELF concept, I came to the realization “… why my other colleagues are great public speakers – they were basically themselves!” Maybe I need to just be more open and be natural when I speak to teachers. Then there is the issue of things I regarded as extremely important such that meeting of deadlines. While others may consider this as a personality conflict, I thought about its significance in terms of helping my team to work harder, think more creatively or moving out of their comfort zone.

By embracing our frustrations, I believe that it would help transform our workplace from a constant source of frustration to a beneficial environment where we continually improve. And since we cannot usually change the person or situation, the easiest thing to change is our ATTITUDE. And our attitude may well have been the problem all along.

Monday, February 3, 2014

My Take on motivation N discipline



All of us teachers are tempted to try to recreate for our students the best parts of our own school experience. We want our students to have the same advantage that we did. At the same time, it is important to realize that our students today also want their own school experience, and that expectation may differ in crucial ways from what we teachers valued most when we went to school.

One example is that students today expect success but are unwilling to work for it. Students want “fast and easy” instead of “work and earn.” Many teachers are frustrated with such notion that guides many students of today. Students often miss the idea that it is their responsibility to learn, practice and even attend school. Instead, they often feel as though they should be adequately “entertained.” Feeling “GOOD” has become more valued than working “HARD”. Expectation of entitlement with little effort is common in today’s classroom.

One of my teacher blogged about inspiring (which I equate to intrinsic motivating) our students, goals can be easier to achieve and is more sustainable. I agree that as a teacher, we need to be able to intrinsically motivate our students. In addition to intrinsic motivation, I would also add the need for discipline. But why need to add discipline? I hear of teachers who question what to do with students who are not prepared for lesson, and will not study. Although, I know it is difficult to assess which is the cause and which is the result, but finding the ways and means to increase intrinsic motivation (such as my teacher’s suggestion to focus on the underlying reason of why students want to study, like getting students to simply complete the sentence, “I want to study .......... because…….” ) can help solve behavioral problems. I know that our students’ problems may defy the above simplistic solution, but I feel that as teachers, what we can and must do is to reawaken the intrinsic motivation in our students especially those who have lost interest in studying and perhaps hope. I believe that those students without intrinsic motivation and discipline often make us teachers wonder why we bother with them at all when there are my “other” students who want to learn. In addition, they “push” our buttons and “test” our limits, challenge us! Unless we teachers are careful, our students can burn us out as well. Hence, it is important that students be intrinsically motivated and discipline.