Weapons to Kill a Teacher
- WEAPONS that you should use during the class:
The first weapon that can help you motivate your teacher is your participation during the class. Do not be shy to ask questions or make comments or observations on what you have not understood because you will lose control of the lessons and you may find it hard to go back to the discussed ideas. While the teacher gives you a few minutes to ask questions, try to think about any question concerning the topic you are discussing. Try to be humble and take the initiative to speak because no one can hold you back from doing so. Your understanding of the lesson is all that matters.
Your self-confidence is another weapon and the key that you have to take care of. Many introverted students find it difficult to communicate their words with people since they do not make their self-confidence work for them but rather against them. How?
- Before an introvert student takes the initiative to speak, he/she starts worrying about the following questions:
- Do I have the right to speak?
- Is what I am going to say right?
- Will the teacher and students listen to me?
- Are they going to laugh at what I will say? If so, I will never participate
during the class.
- An extrovert student, however, does not think about what will happen if they participate in the class because they think that being an introvert student represents the end of the learning process. Fortunately, they always raise their hands to speak not only to ask questions or make comments, but also to complement their understanding by asking their teacher about recapitulations of the course
WEAPONS that you should use outside the class:
The easiest way to be alarmed about your life long learning is working outside. You do not have to blame your teacher for not giving you much information about the topic being discussed, and do not consider what is written in your textbooks as the general frame of information. Being a student does not mean just only participating during the class, but also working outside the class. This is the time when the weapon of being an Active learner could work. Simply put, you have to do more than listen to a lecture. Try to be greedy in making clear the information being discussed by looking for references and sources of information and doing research as well. In fact, the role of your teacher during the class is to explain and simplify the given material. Instead, loading the students by making it obvious at any minute the hidden information during the class would represent a consumption of time since the learner plays a passive role.
Doing exercises is another weapon that would make you more knowledgeable about what your teacher is handing out as information. This is because of exercises’ effective results which show how much you grasp the given material.
There is no need for learning your lessons by heart. Doing exercises that are provided in your student book will help you discover and complement what is missing in your understanding. Do not anticipate that the exercises given in your student book are boring and misleading, but rather they help shape your knowledge and find out other questions that could be the key to open other subject matters.
The well-known proverb that says, “Never put off ‘till tomorrow what you can do today”still has a powerful effect in the life of every single student. Procrastination will never help you have your duties done. Imagine that you postpone what you can do today until a certain time because of the following reasons:
* I do not have to do the homework now; today’s English lesson is too
easy.
* Tomorrow is a holiday; I will revise my lessons later.
* I do not have to stay up late because there’s always tomorrow.
* I cannot concentrate because the weather is cold.
* I am going to visit my best friend. I will finish my tasks when I returned.
* Tomorrow is the wedding of my brother. I don’t have to do the homework
and my teacher won’t punish me.
Successful students never postpone or delay the crucial tasks that they can do now until tomorrow because they consider the fact that they will be loaded with too much homework and won’t have enough time to accomplish what should be done.
Do not be lazy and stop procrastination. Try to teach yourself ways of doing your tasks early rather than looking for reasons to put them off later. The more you do your duties at the right moment the more you will become successful.
By AYOUB RHAZI, Advanced 6