Passing the Buck

There is an existing assumption in some teachers that students are like buckets to be filled by mere transmission of knowledge. Another assumption is that students can be passed on like a buck to the next level or another teacher even without actually meeting the qualifications to be advanced anyway. Teachers will find it really hard and may as often fail, with those streams of thought guiding their professional practice.

First, students are not buckets to be filled to the brim. They are learners who come to school for several reasons, but ultimately needing the help of a mature adult to train them for life. As learners, they have unique abilities to process knowledge. For a student to learn, he needs to be equipped with the reason, explanation, example, practice and instructions that would enable him to demonstrate the expected change in behavior.

I have never done well in Algebra, although I excelled in Trigonometry, Geometry and Statistics. Until now I could not solve problems about fractions. My teachers should know these of course, but there was no remidation after all. This is my waterloo, that's why I am in the field of communication - a justification founded on the left-right brain divide.

The teacher ought to discover how students do and in what best ways work for them. Teachers are not supposed to process knowledge for the learners and hand them knowledge as if it is surely absorbed by mere verbal transfer. They have to create the experiences where students can discover that knowledge and be motivated to gain more.

Even though I could articulately solve simple equations, I could not go as far when it becomes complicated. No wonder, my high school teacher got me join a math contest, and I still passed my Algebra in College. If my teachers had intervened, and really got to the root of my weaknesses in Mathematics, I knew I could have advanced.

I would have appreciated that my teachers had informed me of why I was having difficulty in understanding how an equation operates. If only they could translate their quantitative thinking in a fashion my visual and linguistic mind would understand. I knew I was highly logical, but my numerical skill was insufficiently nurtured.

Second, there are learning (not teaching) goals that a teacher should enable the students to meet. Only when they are met, that a teacher has succeeded. These goals are translated into objectives that meet the learning needs of students. Hence, they are revised as needed to be more significant for the learners. A teacher's goal is never to pass the student like a buck to another teacher, because there is nothing anymore that can be done.

Now that I am a teacher, I still meet students who don't even know how to conjugate the verb "write" in its progressive form. They spell it with a double "t" as in WRITTING. This lesson is part of the basic education curriculum, specifically in the primary years of a child's schooling.

If this error occur as they get into college, one thing is for sure. That, their teacher in their basic education had overlooked this mistake, and so the buck is passed to their college English teacher. As I noticed this error, I would immediately highlight that part in a student's work, flash the correct spelling on screen or write it on the board.

If a student commit a spelling error on a basic word, how then can we expect them to distinguish the difference between fragments and the sense of a complete sentence? Passing the buck in teaching to the succeeding teachers do not help the learner. It is out of convinience and the expediency of handling the teaching load that irresponsible teachers would opt for this.

If teaching has to be made more meaningful for the students, "right there and then" a teacher should be able to guide a learner into what is "right". Rightness in English Language instruction would mean observing the Langauge Standards, with a capital "S", not just the teacher's standard.