As a teacher and hagwon owner, a motivated student is probably the best case scenario. But reality dictates otherwise. Simply said, the way education is force fed unto students, it is very easy to see that children don’t understand the value of education. They only experience the wrenching of the mind when they have to churn out pages of useless facts that they can forget about a week later. We are actually talking about the Disappointed student.
Let’s look at the strategy one employs to deal with this situation. A school needs students in their classes, and they are dealing with a high percentage of unmotivated students in the classroom. I often see the easy way out a lot of people take, which I find deplorable. They focus on “games” and “edutainment”, or even candies to keep the kids happy. I am not saying that these are bad, people always assume because I ask a question about the added value of an action, that I think that action is bad. Not so.
Why is this so bad? The problem is HABIT. Good education relies on children having good study habits. How many times do kids constantly say, “Teacher! Game”. These children know that 1. Teachers have to keep the kids happy and 2. the adults are a bit lazy and games is always an easy cop out for any teacher fighting his own boredom in the classroom. A teacher should categorically say “No!”, but it is obvious that giving into the temptation of an easy class will turn that “No!” into a “Why not?”
The teacher’s job is just the OPPOSITE. The teacher’s job is to get children interested in the topic of study. To get their creative juices going and to get them to participate in ENJOYING LEARNING. Yes, games can add flavor to the class, but please, no hangman. Yes, edutainment can help children to focus, but a school is not a circus, you have a goal to achieve, which is the improvement of children’s prospects in life. Yes, candy is fine, but keep it for the festivities. Candy every day doesn’t make for better children.
Therefore the strategy should be to get positively engaged with the class. It really is that simple.
Anyone care to disagree :)
Craig says:
I use games mainly for reinforcement of target language, especially for younger kids. i tend to use games like the powerpoint bomb games you find on waygook.org. the kids love it but importantly they only get to play a round if they answer the target language correctly. u can adapt the powerpoint to show pictures for the topic your on. whether your building vocab or something like pronouns, so for me it can be an important tool for livening up classes. the kids thoroughly enjoy it, i do too and the learning/reinforcement blends seemlessly into the game. but yeh id agree if the game wasnt tied into any learning at all thats just wasting time for the sake of it, and the kids understand that games are rewards for showing enthusiasm to study and put in effort and not to be taken for granted.
TheBoss says:
Thank you Craig. In your case, you have access to multi-media. I’m still on the fence when it comes to the use of multi-media.