Teacher and Student Mentality: An Insight

After merely three months of teaching, I shamelessly feel qualified to make an essay out of my experience. Well, who’s to blame? It’s my opinion in my blog after all. :P

In case you haven’t conceived this yet: teaching is serious business! I had never imagined, as a student, how teaching reaches lengths beyond the usual classroom meetings. Teaching used to be an ideal: an erudite person steps into the class to enlighten all us dim souls for 40 minutes – or as those in the educational industry prefer to have it professionally, “one meeting”.

Now, as the “erudite person who steps into the class”, I have probably assumed my own ideal persona in every big fat professional meeting, but behind the classroom facade is a series of uncompromising duties one will never learn of during his twelve years of primary education: assessing individuals, preparing suitable materials, keeping up with the learning pace, researching about and reviewing possible instructional blunders, optimizing teaching speed with the ideal syllabus provided, improvising for new matters and methods, coming up with quizzes and exam questions, identifying students’ problems, getting checked about the curriculum by the boss… the list goes on and on.

Nearly a year after my graduation from high school, I suddenly grasped all the aforementioned hell of teaching, and I came to admire those teachers whose endeavors in keeping all their students under one line I had once hated with passion. Teaching, it turns out, is not a “learn it or drop it” escapist profession.

The main point of this article today is to explain the huge gap between teachers and students. I’m not talking about knowledge – even that’s not a definite – but rather about the mentality.

One thing that struck me for odd is how different their perceptions are for assignments. Generally speaking, students have far better memory of what tasks they have at hand, while teachers tend to be forgetful of what homework they have handed to their students.

Take, for example, whatever weekend assignment my lecturer in university used to give us. At the following week’s meeting, she would most likely have forgotten about it, unless on rare occasions she was reminded by something. My classmates – myself included -, however, would buzz about the assignments and scatter around the classroom for “references”. But as a tutor, I tend to forget anything I assigned to my students, unless reminded – which really is a striking paradox. Considering that the test sample – myself – should have the same degree of discipline, then the logical explanation for my perception of “assignments” would come from which position I am in, whether as a teacher, or as a student.

The psychological reason is probably connected to our perception of “burden”. When you’re the teacher, the effect of giving assignments on your mind is very temporary. The extent of work you’ll need to do is to tell your students which page to finish, or what topic to write on, etc. Then your mind will relax. I have given them the task to do. It’s up to them now to do it or not. If any, preparing the homework may be your very burden that you’ll unload at class. On the other hand, students’ burden starts when they are given tasks to do, and their mind will be enter a state of panic. I have to finish this task. It’s all up to me now. Therefore, assignments form a burden serving as a reminder to a student of his responsibility, while for a teacher they are a forgettable relief.

Another difference in mentality is regarding the “period of study”. More than once, when I was sitting in the classroom and my teacher announced that we were going to have an exam, I would be like, “Darn! Another exam already?”. The classroom meetings flew away, and without me knowing, I was three months into university then, just like that. In the teacher’s uniform, however, I took up a whole other attitude toward the classes. After what seemed like walking the Great Wall of China end-to-end (read: being incredulously lethargic), my attendance roll completely baffled me. What? Only eight meetings after all that!? Further evidence, my students also seemed to suffer from the same “meeting count” syndrome, only that they took it like I did as a student: What? Eight meetings already!?

There are two possible explanations I can offer. Firstly, teachers work toward “finishing their job as soon as possible”. There are various factors, like wishing that students would quickly master their lessons, preparing for their end-semester materials, etc., but the most prominent one is probably waiting for the salary - as they say, “the pay is never too early”. On the other hand, students are “apprehensive toward the end of their study”. It probably has something to do with their learning nature (that they will always crave to learn more), or it may be as simple as they are afraid of the exams – as they say, “the exam is never too late”.

My second explanation involves the very routine of students and teachers. When you think about it, a student may study whole days and weeks, but he studies with different teachers, about different subjects, and gains different experiences. In short, a student most likely won’t take their routine as boring. But a teacher is a different story. He teaches whole days and weeks, and while he teaches different students, he talks about the exact same subjects, and the experiences gained are minimal. This contributes to the teacher’s having the psychological impression of “I have been teaching for a long time”, only to find himself scoring three or four meetings for each student. This point is apparent from how students seem to have no problem memorizing tens of teachers’ names, but teachers have troubles memorizing just few. For students, all their teachers are different entities. For teachers,  each student seems to have the same face, since all of them are “the same”.

In a nutshell, the two differences between a teacher and a student are:

1. A teacher unleashes burden by giving assignments. Result: being forgetful about them, yet pressured when there are none.
   A student receives burden by getting assignments. Result: constantly reminded about them, and relieved when there are none.
2. A teacher works toward the end. Result: the process of teaching seeming to be neverending.
   A student resents the end. Result: the process of learning feeling very transient.

My point here: unless you have the passion for blabbering your knowledge to some notebook-and-pencil holding people, always treat the teaching profession as a last resort. Teaching requires a great deal of commitment and effort, and involves a superficially invisible mental burden. Also, try to appreciate your teachers for what they do now. As I have said before, teaching is serious business!

P.S.: In case you haven’t noticed, this article is a quasi-rant of my tutor job.

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