Recently, one of my sisters forwarded me an email with an interesting story about a dinner conversation between a CEO and a teacher. The CEO, trying to make his point that the problem with education is that students are taught by people whose highest aspiration is to end up with such lowly paid jobs, turned to the teacher at the table and asked her what she made. Instead of giving the CEO a dollar figure, she turned the tables on him by listing the things she would ‘make’ her students learn – hard work, sacrifice, responsibility, determination, to have a questioning mind, etc. - and concluded that in doing so, she would ‘make’ a difference in the world when they turned out to be doctors and engineers and even CEOs.
It is a heartwarming story for those who have (or had) a teaching role in schools, at home, or elsewhere, that what they do has a significant impact on the society we live in and in the world of tomorrow.
The story caused me to reflect on my own education, particularly the teachers who made a difference in my life. Teachers who had not only imparted knowledge but also the love of learning as well as an approach to learning that would be useful even after I was done with school.
In high school, I struggled with two subjects: advanced mathematics and the Malay language. I dreaded attending the classes because I could not relate to what the teachers were trying to get across. It seemed to me that my math teacher was talking to the blackboard every time because, if he was talking to me, I had no clue what he was saying. The Malay language teacher would bring up one ancient Malay poem after anther, reveling in the beauty, structure, and rhythm of each when it should have been evident that the class, which was entirely made up of Chinese kids, did not have a sufficient grasp of the language itself. I dutifully took notes of what I did not comprehend, doubting that I would ever get close to understanding the subjects. The following year, I had new teachers for the subjects and suddenly everything that had been seemingly incomprehensible the year before made sense. How did that happen? What changed? The magic of their teaching methods cleared the fog in my brains and I was able to grasp the logic of advanced mathematics and the complexity of prefixes and suffixes in Malay.
When I was in college, one particular lecturer stood out. She told the class that she didn’t want us just to study hard but she wanted us to study smart. She started by teaching us to look for the underlying logic and reasoning behind each topic. She helped us relate what we’ve learned to real world examples so that the lesson wasn’t just purely academic. She taught us to analyze exam questions before attempting to answer them. She taught us to look for the different parts to a question, the total score possible for each part of a question so we didn’t spend too much time on a part that fetched only a few marks. She gave us a feel of the kind of answers examiners would look for and what gets us points and what won’t. More than just the tactics to learning and passing exams, she taught us see the big picture and not be always stuck in the details or waste valuable resources in trying to be perfect. She knew that most of her students were not from rich family backgrounds and we had to be smart about getting through our coursework and exams. She understood that the end goal for us was not just to pass exams but to get a good job that would hopefully help us realize our goals in life.
Once I started working, I quickly learned that whatever I had learned in school and in college was but a tiny dot at tip of the iceberg. I had to learn the business that the company was engaged in. I had to spend long hours pouring through numbers and contracts and processes. It was an exciting time and it was rewarding when I was finally able to apply my knowledge to my work, using it to improve processes, organization and, ultimately, profitability. For all those wonderful experiences, I will forever be grateful to those teachers in my life that taught me everything I know and instilled in me the love of learning new things.
There’s an old Chinese proverb that goes, “Give a man a fish and he will have food for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Keeping that analogy in mind, the best thing that a teacher ever taught me was how to fish.
It is unfortunate that teaching and class sizes will be impacted once the Federal and State budget cuts come into effect. We can all try to pass the buck and push the cuts onto someone or somewhere else but there is no denying that we can’t have what we can’t afford. My hope is that the cuts will help spur us towards more intelligent ways of teaching, helping our kids learn how to fish rather than just giving our kids a fish. After all, education does not stop at the school doors.
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