By GHK Lall- Better and more seasoned minds than mine have weighed in with recommendations to address our learning deficits. Deficits in learning and not just the all-important Math and English disciplines. For whatever it is worth, I make my halfpenny contribution; it should have some merit from roles as almost a decade as a teacher, and a lifetime as a student. The latter continues uninterrupted. There is certainty of some overlap with prior efforts, but I persist, since repetition may be helpful as reinforcement.
I discern five minimum components to ideas and visions about educational enhancement. The raw materials (students), the cooks (teachers), the equipment (classroom), the process (methods), and the environments (home and school). I think there must be a system to identify our gifted and a process that grooms them from early. The strugglers must also be noted for extra attention and such helpful treatment that could wrest whatever may be dormant inside to lift them.
Classroom size has a bearing, with some start made to offer our children a better learning environment. Overheated furnaces are not conducive to learning. Too many subjects, like too many ingredients, have spoiled many a plot. Limit them to 15. Make better use of teaching resources’ there is more time for Math and English. What point is proved, what benefit nationally, with 2 or three dozen subjects, other than ego thrill and parental pride? We are overloading our students unnecessarily, subscribing to whims and fancies.
Teachers are resentful and dispirited by what they interpret as insulting percentages. Need I say more about their treatment, the way they perceive it, how it leaves them to struggle? Contented teachers make for productive students. It is a reciprocal back scratching exercise. Be there and look out for me, and it is guaranteed that those considerations will be returned. Only low, mangy dawgs are not made that way.
The classroom must be converted to a place of energy and driving intensity. Open forums. Arguments and counters. Skills shared and discussions generated. Criticism is normal and correction is taken in stride. Democratic dialogue starts in the classroom, with more proactive citizens resulting. Our children must be nurtured in this direction and weaned away from the existing culture of filling up notebooks for endless hours and unending days. Teachers must be geared toward this new standard.
If students and teachers remain glued to a culture of note giving and notetaking, then Guyana will find itself overloaded with rafts of stenographers, when what it needs is a regiment of scientists and analysts. Our young (and old) must be pushed towards thinking more critically and talking more sensibly. If not, get ready for social media English Language standards and logic, and WhatsApp narrowness. The former profanes any tongue; the latter needs five different texts to communicate one message.
A passion for reading must be cultivated. Where there is dedication to reading, there should be some gathering of knowledge, more than a little learning. The two [reading and a mind open to learning] helps with an interest in writing. There is a body bursting to share what has been gleaned. The process now comes in for attention. I have never been enamored with group learning, though it prepares for what occurs in the world beyond the classroom, whenever that arrives. Too many shelter under that broad umbrella, never deliver on initiative, nor dig deep for hidden possibilities. For the resourceful and well-resourced, SBAs have been reduced to a cheat sheet of calculated effort. I stop there.
Our learning processes and methods must be seen as a laboratory. Given the limits of our achievements and the extensive nature of our needs, we must be willing to try what has not been tried. I suggest that we experiment on how to help students overcome their trepidation with math, their weakness with reasoning. The ideal is where every student is a debater and each one a writer that captures the essence of the points that s/he wishes to make. A love of reading and absorbing helps. The nature of classrooms will have to be rethought and remade, so that Guyana gets a different type of student. The ancient is not gaining traction with the masses. Why layer that with what has not worked?
Last, parents have two key jobs: police their homes better, take charge, demand more from their children. In the parent-child partnership, there will be a time for ‘NO’, one for nurturing, and another for nuance. There is a place for tough love and the time for working with teachers doesn’t work with the regular clock. It is continuous, even intrusive. In the classroom, the foundations of past generations have their value, but a new mental architecture is overdue. There must be a new kind of teacher to get a new kind of student. And not just in the core subjects of Math and English. Teacher training and incentives are a must. The new student will emerge from the home, and from what is garnered in the new classroom, as it is powered with some of the elements I specified.
