Failure is an inevitable part of learning process

Category: Teaching

What difference does it make? Nothing matters. No one cares. When was the last time your students were interested in your class? Is that you or them? or both?

“They are sucking the joy out of teaching!”  You know who “they” are. All those teenagers who are chatting, texting and eating junk food every time you turn around.  Why can’t students just pay attention and be quiet?

When students are not engaged, attention wanes. When attention wanes, learning decreases. Yeah, sometimes you got frustrated but who don’t? We are humans, not machines. Well, we all make some mistakes, so just put them behind you.

"A person, who never made a mistake, never tried anything new." - Albert Einstein

The most important thing here is how we will learn from those bad decisions we made. Furthermore, experience comes from our way of teaching and also comes from failure. Failure is not a bad thing. It’s a guaranteed and inevitable part of learning process. As teachers, we see failure as an opportunity to receive feedback on our strengths as well as our areas of improvement in order to get better.

There are times over the course of a teacher’s career where initial passion is replaced by frustration, fatigue, or cynicism. – Christopher Day (2004). “A passion for teaching”

The main reasons a teacher might lose his or her passion for teaching are:

• National Education Policies.
• Student behavior.
• Too much paperwork.

Adjusting to national education policies
Nowadays, teachers feel more pressure to follow the national and state education policies than doing their job successfully. Besides, these strict standards make teachers teach their students to pass only the test and make projects.
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Teachers must understand that they can still personalize their lessons and try to adapt the contents from the Syllabus to their student’s level following the guidelines of the education policies. Providing many opportunities for students to work with the social practices of the language based on your values toward education and the philosophy you hold about teaching.

“There is no formula for successful teaching. Each professor is unique and has an individual educational philosophy and teaching goals.” - Rossett, J. and Fox, P. G. (2009).
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Dealing with difficult behavior
Have you ever felt unappreciated, disrespected and exhausted because of disruptive students? Sometimes when teacher stops developing his or her creativity in the classroom, the class gets boring, the students don’t pay attention and it leads to a cyclical burnout.

The teacher should investigate why these problems are occurring and find out how to develop deeper relationships with their students. Also, the use of behavioral reminder like pointing to a classroom rules chart and move the student’s seat away from distracting peers can work.
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Too much paper work
In the fast changing world of the early 21st-century, public education is also changing. Education is a fundamental right for everyone and key to the future of any country. Public education has its price everywhere, so the money that the government spends every year in education has to show good result in order to provide access to high-quality education for everyone.

​According to this idea, the teachers have to do a lot of research and find out the best way to teach and improve their student learning and achievement. How many students flunk out and why? What is the percentage of students who has learning disabilities? Sometimes the teacher should present too much statistical data in tables and graphs.

Reference

• Day, C. (2004). A passion for teaching. London and New York: Routledge and Falmer.

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