Grades aren't all that matter

Many people think, and I used to be one of them, that education is a one-way process: the teachers teach and the students learn. That is purely a myth. I learned more from my students than I learned when I was a student myself or could have learned had I gone to graduate school instead.

My 20 years of teaching was both a humbling and an enriching experience. In the course that I "enrolled" in (More than Life 101), there were no lectures because theories were not applicable; instead, we had more practical application, a lot of hands-on training, daily actual life demos. There were a lot of homeworks and no holidays (a teacher was like a 24/7 guardian, counsellor, shock absorber, information center all rolled into one), no "take two" (it's either you pass or your fail, period) and no syllabus - the twists and turns were unpredictable, you never have an inkling what the next test will be about, when you have to take it or who will give it, you just have to be always alert.

It was difficult to come up with a list to summarize all that I learned from my students. Here's my best try:


1. We're all in this together. Students have to be constantly reminded that they are not alone; that their dream was also my dream and their parents' dreams. You must always make them feel that working towards their goals is definitely not just a one-man undertaking but a collaborative effort. A teacher alone, no matter how good, cannot do anything.
"We're all in this together" was a motto that we adopted many years ago to emphasize that, with teamwork, we can do better, we can do more.

2. "Poverty is not a hindrance to success." I have to make a disclaimer: that statement did not originate from me, contrary to my students' claims. What I did say were: believe in your dreams... believe in yourself ... learn from yesterday then forge ahead and don't look back ... diligence can surpass intelligence ... travel light, don't carry stones (of anger, pain, regrets, etc.) in your pocket. I guess that in their hearts and minds, that quotation summarized all the things I said through the years like a broken record.

3. If it is not true, it is not necessarily false. Adults, in general, tend to have black-or-white, true-or-false mindsets. In a true-or-false quiz, for example, when I'd ask for the answer and the student would say "true" when he should have said "false", more often than not I'd say, "If it's not true, then it must be ..." But one or two students would sometimes argue - "... but that's true only if ..." or pose a hypothetical "what if ..."
This taught me that there are many ways of looking at things and some answers, though correct, are not always 100% correct. That gave me a better perspective in life - it was like acquiring a thousand magnifying glasses so I could look at things more clearly and from many angles. This exercise freed my mind and let my spirit and imagination soar.

4. Try and try until you die ... My favorite Japanese proverb that I shared with them was "Fall down seven times, get up eight." I saw them do this through the years, without complaining about the falls, and I couldn't help but marvel at their perseverance, their fighting spirit, their guts. They just never gave up!

5. All things, even little things, matter. The little notes that I wrote on their papers ('very good" or "I'm impressed" or "I appreciate your effort" or just a smiley) ... a pat on the back or on the head, even if given once in a blue moon ... a text message to congratulate them ... remembering their birthdays or asking about a parent's health. I didn't realize how much these meant to them until they wrote back about how important these "little things" were to them. To this day, some graduates can still remember what I wrote on their papers. I never thought that what took me just a few seconds to do would long be remembered.

6. Walk the tightrope between being a teacher and a friend. It was an everyday struggle to keep my balance - not too friendly, not too strict. The former wasn't too hard but the latter required herculean effort on my part. It was difficult to shake off the influence of an upbringing that centered around almost clockwork, military-like discipline. But through the years, I was compelled to reinvent myself, to be more flexible, to wield both a carrot and a stick and to know when to use one or the other.

7. Grades aren't all that matter. My most successful students aren't necessarily those who got the highest grades. Maybe because the criteria for success in life is quite different from the criteria that schools generally use to compute grades; maybe because success in life requires a different kind of intelligence, sometimes only gut feeling, at other times, your heart more than your brains and still at other times, your brains and not your heart.

8. I want to succeed because ... Many would say, "I want to help my family" or "I want a good paying job." It didn't surprise me a bit to hear these answers. But when I learned that some of my students want to succeed because they want to be able to show some relatives who apparently do not treat them kindly that, despite what they had gone through, they can still reciprocate with kindness, I was stunned.

9. Smile and smile a lot. This was something that I had to practice - to smile more often, to smile a lot. Well, I learned that a smile says more and gets the message across faster.

I just want to add something to grades aren't all that matter. Some people think that a high grade (90+) will always make a student happy. I found out from my students that this is not so. In a class where they were asked to comment in general about the grades that they got, many complained about getting high grades in a course where they didn't learn anything. Of course, this also meant that they gave the teacher/s low marks in the evaluation sheet.

"To teach is to touch lives forever" - that's my favorite saying about teachers and teaching. Actually, it goes both ways. A teacher's job is not easy - there are long hours, low pay, lots of responsibilities, lots of problems. But all the lessons that I learned from my students more than made up for all the headaches and the heartaches.

And if I were asked to go back and choose again, I'd still choose to teach.

-Bugsybee, "What I Learned From My Students", 21 May 2005

Being a teacher is tough work. They seem to be juggling more administrative work than before. Among the things that had changed significantly from the past is that a lot of parents expect teachers not just to be educate their academically but also morally. I think it's sad because parents (and even relatives) in the family should be the main people teaching and instilling in their children the correct values and principles. It's not fair to expect teachers to be the ones totally responsible for their children moral upbringing. Do I expect a stranger to teach how my child should live correctly? That's a rather surprising phenomenon I notice.