TEACHING TO MASTER SKILLS.

                                                          photo by gettyimages    

As a teacher before teaching you need to ask yourself if you teach your students to master skills of life so they can use these skills to control their lives or you just teach them to pass their National examinations.

Researches shows that half of the students graduated in East Africa are not good enough to be hired.That means apart from spending so many years at school learning, these students are not mastering skills to help them do different kind of jobs in real life.But what is the source of all this?.

I think the problem start in classes especially with we teachers.If we can change our way of thinking towards students and education,everything is going to change.

We don't just need to choose between teaching students to pass their exams or teaching them to master skills of life! we just need to start thinking from beginning in order to understand the real aim of education. Most of the the time we ask our students or children the job they want to do in their life. We are not just suppose to take this question as a jock but to use it as a focus when we teach our children.

If a child is telling you he or she want to be a doctor or a lawyer,then we should consider their dream carriers and teach them accordingly rather than teaching them the skill of memorizing things.What is the point when the student is telling you that he or she want to be a doctor and apart from familiarizing that student with hospital knowledge you focus much on making sure that the student can memorize and pass their exams.

The very important thing to we teachers when we are teaching is to teach students how they can control their lives.This is only done by letting students practice what they want to do in life.All people who discovered things we use in our lives,they did that by practicing.That is why some of them like Bil gate couldn't finish their studies,but because they mastered the skills of life they became successful.

If you want to do some research on this to check if your students are just memorizing things or they understand what they are learning and they can apply them in their life, ask some of the the students one question in two different ways;

Example, what is 23-5? and then ask again, If i have 23 chickens then I sell five among them,how many chickens will remain?. Most of the time memorizing students can be able to answer the first question but it will be hard for them to answer the second one. That means this student can not apply the knowledge he or she get from the class to the real life although she or he might pass the exams.

LETS TEACH OUR STUDENTS SKILLS AND NOT EXAMINATION TECHNIQUES!!.

THANKS!.