The ManicaPost
Morris Mtisi
It is a new year and a new grade or form on the journey of learning. Almost all teachers and learners are strangers in the common homogeneity of school business. It is often excitement for the beginning pupils and those in a new class in the progression of knowledge acquisition.
Every teacher with a new class, please! Do not torture those poor children. Do not drug them with your ice-cold boredom and lifelessness. Inject a vaccine of life, fun, joy and excitement into your pupils-right here in the first lesson(s).
Remember teachers! You are public speakers. Your audience is your class. Your first lesson will make or break those children. It is this first lesson or first few lessons which will make the new class love you and your subject or hate both to death throughout the year. Be very careful. Be at your best now. Tomorrow may be too late. You do not want your students to each raise a save-our-souls alarm – “Rescue Me!” And write protest statements on the board, walls or furniture.
You may not be the best of teachers, most of us are not. But make an effort. Win the hearts and minds of these children or students today. Do not wait for tomorrow. What you do in these first few days will determine fixed tastes in your children … in your class; tastes which will form standards for a worth of the year’s course. You are responsible for making ordinary learning an appealing, appropriable experience full of assimilation and enjoyment.
You and you alone will reveal a depth and range of meaning and joy in learning which otherwise might be sanguine, mediocre or trivial. A good teacher markets himself or herself and the subject area this time of the year. This first impression is critical. In your professional fullness and ability, craftily exhibit qualities of enjoyable worth. Do not kill those children! If the precious class in the previous year was heaven; don’t make yours hell! Please have mercy on those children!
First impressions are not luxuries of education. They are emphatic expressions of everything that makes education worthwhile.
Every human being has inborn emotional intelligence. Teachers . . . teachers! Take advantage of your share of emotional intelligence to arouse that of your pupils.
Best wishes in teaching and learning for 2018! There is good news at the helm of Primary and Secondary Education in the name of Professor Paul Mavima. He has the office, in increased and careful degree, to make Zimbabwean education make the best sense. Let us be good news down there doing our best in schools and classrooms. When learning is guided by purpose, and conducted by expertise and method, it becomes sensible and enjoyable. We need teachers who not only know this, but exhibit it in adequate measure.
