Teaching in our Hearts

After 7 years of trying to learn my art of teaching, every class comes down to this: my students and I, face to face engaged in an exchange – communication. The techniques I have mastered do not disappear, but I know that neither do they suffice. I have to continually apply the techniques, reflect and change. Face to face with my students, only one resource is at my immediate command, my identity, my sense of this “I” who teaches – without which I am not sure if my students will learn – this is what I know as important.

In every class I teach, my ability to connect with my students, and so to connect them to the subject, depends less on the methods I use but more on the degree to which I know and willing to make it available. My evidence for this claim comes, in part, from years of asking students to tell me about their good teachers. In every story I heard, they would share one trait, a strong sense of identity together with the teaching. “ Mr Ang is really there when he teaches”, a student tell me “Ms Ng has such enthusiasm for her subject”

I believe that as teachers, there is no way to separate ourselves, the subject we are teaching and the students whom we are teaching. They are joined and undivided whole. The connections made are held not by my methods but in our hearts – the place where our minds, our body and our hearts will converge in each of us.

As such, the ability to connect to our students can be showed in many forms as there are many forms of personality. Two great teachers stand out from my own experience at NIE and during my masters course. They differ radially from each other in technique, but both were grifted at connecting students, teacher and subject in a common point of learning.

One did not know the meaning of silence and often lectured incessantly while we listen. Indeed he became so engaged with his materials –through stories from his own lives and great thinkers that we too become stimulated to learn. The other assigned lots of reading and when we gathered around, encouraged by her brilliant guidance, started doing the readings, making comments and asking questions, proving herself to be interactive.

These two great teachers were polar opposites in substance and in style. But both created the connectedness, the point of learning, which is essential to teaching and learning. They did so by trusting and teaching from their own identity and integrity that is the centre of all good work – and by using the different techniques that allowed them to show to us students rather than conceal who they were.

These two great teachers had inspired and provided me with profound gift which I would never forget. It is not only about techniques, but how I would grow in bring forth myself and amplify the same gift which I have received onto my students.

Above shows photo of my class of 4E3 celebrating my Birthday with me.