Teacher Student Relationship_Part 1

Teaching is a universal pursuit – everyone does it. Parents teach their children, senior colleagues teach their juniors, spouses teach one another and of course, teachers teach their students. As students spend a large part of their waking hours in school, teachers also spend an amazing amount of time teaching their students in class. Teachers find that time richly rewarding because it helps students to learn new skills and acquire new knowledge. Such times are joyous learning for both students and teachers – it motivates the teachers to continue contributing to the development of their students.

But as practitioners, we teachers also know that teaching students can also be terribly frustrating and draining mental and emotionally with disappointment. These are times when the teacher discover to his/her dismay that his/her enthusiastic desire to teach something worthwhile to students somehow fails to cause an enthusiastic desire in his/her students to learn.

When students seemingly without reason, refuse to learn what teacher so unselfishly and nobly willing to teach them, teaching is anything but nerve-racking to the teacher. In fact, it will be a miserable experience which may lead to feelings of fear, hopelessness, inadequacy and too often, hate and deep resentment towards the unwilling and ungrateful learner!! Have you observed others or had conversations with others about such situations in your personal and professional teaching experiences? Are teachers equipped to deal with his/her own or the students' emotions?

So, what makes the difference between teaching that works and teaching that fails and teaching that brings joyful and rewarding learning and teaching that causes frustration and anguish? Certainly there are many different factors such as teaching practices, engagement in learning, teacher student relationship, peer relation, recognition and discipline that influence the outcome of the teacher's efforts to teach student. But I feel that one of the factors contributing the most – namely the degree of effectiveness of the teacher is establishing a particular kind relationship with students. In this, I mean that it is the quality of the teacher student relationship that is crucial – more crucial, in fact, than what the teacher is teaching, how the teacher does it, or whom the teacher is trying to teach! Why is this so? Well, I believe that without quality teacher student relationship, very little learning will take place.