In our students´shoes

When you are a child, you generally fantasize with an adult life of yours. You will pretend to be a receptionist and answer the plastic toy phone or even wear your mum´s high-heeled shoes and her make-up to think of yourself as a top model. Where does all that imagination go when we actually become grown-ups?
How come teachers find it so hard to place themselves in their students´shoes? It isn´t so difficult if they just tried to take into account the audience of their classes and had a little bit of interest in taking the trouble to get to know them. Teenagers are already undergoing too many psychological and physical changes for teachers not to consider each student as what they are: different and unique human beings.
As far as I´m concerned teenagers feel at a loss in many things and they sometimes hide it behing the mask of rebellion. Wouldn´t it be worthwhile to take them seriously and make an effort to understand what they expect from us?
By Miriam Rodríguez
Chapter 7

Human Beings: Decision Makers

I thing taking decisions in life is by far the most painful process humans have to undergo. You may say I´m being rather pessimistic about this issue, after all, it´s better to take a decision yourself rather than being impossed what to do.
What I mean is that we cannot avoid experiencing a sense of responsibility in any decision we take. No matter how hard you try to foresee what can happen if you take one course of an action or another, but in the end you deeply inside know you cannot anticipate so much because you never know what impact it can cause. The umpredicable nature of possiblilites provokes the inevitable anguish of not really knowing what will happen.
One always boasts about the decisions that caused a good result, but we never dare say a word if the result was not what we had expected. I´ve always wondered if this is in the human nature or if it´s just me who find it so difficult to assume responsibility for what I did not intend to happen, although I definitely know taking decisions means making use of our freedom.
By Miriam Rodriguez
Chapter 6

Constant learning

I’m afraid I’d like to insist on the means to achieve a goal, as I previously did in my previous post.
When delivering a lesson, a teacher knows exactly what to teach and what to expect from the students. However, it is not always clear how to deal with the input so that it becomes the students´ output.
During the teaching-learning process, there are certain factors we must consider, but best of all, we must not forget that it’s human beings we are dealing with, not just “students”. In getting to know our students as far as a teacher-student relationship can go, we are adding an extra but essential element to our teaching. If, on the contrary, we dehumanize the whole process, we risk ignoring our most important role: helping them to be better human beings.
I believe it’s not an easy job, basically because you can not learn that from books. It’s through experience and constant learning from our students that we are likely to succeed.
By Miriam Rodriguez
Chapter 5