Making Students Get Hooked To Learning

“A Good Teacher is a Bad Teacher: Teaching versus Making Students Learn”

At some point of time during my school days, I learned that lucid step-by-step explanations by my Mathematics teachers did not help me in solving mathematical problems on my own. Though I learned it, I did not become conscious of it till my doctoral program.

I had a privileged background. My father was educated and also a college teacher in Mathematics for sometime. During my vacations, he used to pose problems that I had to solve by evening. If I did not complete them by evening, I will be put to shame by his solving them. That was a challenge and I struggled and solved them on my own. That is what made me learn mathematics.

The teachers, who lucidly explained how to solve those problems with the logic behind, never offered such challenges. We students were under the myth that we could be as good as our teachers by being attentive to them. We did like those teachers and later in my life I realized that we liked them because they were good performers. We liked their performance. But, we didn’t get trained.

It is during my doctoral days that I became reflective and realized that it is not those lucid explanations but my own struggles that helped me learn. There was nobody who could or would explain lucidly to me as to how I should do my doctoral dissertation.

My consciousness of the struggles I underwent helped me in becoming a teacher who would take his students through the same route again but with much more lucid explanations than my teachers.

Though I enjoyed that process and became a good performer in the classroom, I realized that I am making the same mistake my teachers made. Instead of making students learn through challenges, I was also making them listen to narrations on my way of solving problems.

That forced me to unlearn an activity that I was good at and go through a period of hardship to learn how I can teach my students to be independent of their teacher or how I can teach them so that I become dispensable.

I started framing questions and sub-questions that I will ask my students which pose simple to complex challenges in a graded manner. I learned to avoid making declarative statements in the classroom and ask only questions. I had to be patient and go at the speed of the slowest learner. And also offer complex challenges to those faster learners.

I find this is not enough. If I have to design learning sessions to make myself ultimately redundant, I have to make my students ask those questions themselves.

So my challenge before me now is: how do I give that initial push to my students to create and pose challenges to themselves so that they get hooked into learning on their own.