Teachers’ perceptions
After reading Sheng Ni-tsai’s letter about teachers’ classroom management challenges (“Teachers’ struggles,” Oct. 3, page 8), I, as an assistant professor who is also on the front line, have a different take on the issue.
I noticed that there is a conflict between paragraph 8 and paragraph 9. Although Sheng is putting all her heart and soul into her work, she is still experiencing acrimonious classroom environments. I would like to address this.
As a French native teaching English and French as foreign languages in Taiwan, I have often had to endure culture shock in the classroom. I have had to change my viewpoints regularly and adjust my teaching pedagogy quite often to match my students’ needs and requirements. Nevertheless, Sheng is a local native Chinese speaker, therefore I do not understand why she is experiencing tough classroom management challenges as described in her letter.
From my perspective, the problem certainly lies in the way teachers perceive their daily classroom management problems. I would like to bring up two lessons that I picked up from the book 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace (Wayne Dyer, 2001).
“You can’t give away what you don’t have” and “you can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it,” he wrote.
The way I see it, the first is relevant to paragraph 8, in which Sheng wrote that “teachers put their heart and soul in their work.” I would like to argue that if that were true, then teachers should already have reached the level of a saint like the two French nuns Saint Theresa and Bernadette Soubirous.
Teachers should have developed unconditional acceptance and the ability to manage their classrooms without any problems. Nevertheless, it appears that most of us cannot be a saint, therefore the best way to work is to remember that we cannot give away the happiness that we do not have. That means that we should try to be happy no matter the circumstances to earn positive feedback from students.
The second lesson “you can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it” can be applied to paragraph 9, in which Sheng wrote that “classroom environments are undeniably turning acrimonious.” From my point of view, this statement leaves us with a gloomy future. I would like to argue that one can use “to believe is to see” to develop a more positive mindset, not “to see is to believe.”
That is to say, when teachers believe that students are nice people, they see them as being so. According to the old saying: “A single rat dropping ruins the whole soup,” one single erroneous idea from the teacher would destroy all her efforts to manage the classroom efficiently. Thus, we have to change our mind about the way we perceive people’s habits and behaviors to improve our classroom management skills.
David Blasco
New Taipei City
The EU’s biggest banks have spent years quietly creating a new way to pay that could finally allow customers to ditch their Visa Inc and Mastercard Inc cards — the latest sign that the region is looking to dislodge two of the most valuable financial firms on the planet. Wero, as the project is known, is now rolling out across much of western Europe. Backed by 16 major banks and payment processors including BNP Paribas SA, Deutsche Bank AG and Worldline SA, the platform would eventually allow a German customer to instantly settle up with, say, a hotel in France
On August 6, Ukraine crossed its northeastern border and invaded the Russian region of Kursk. After spending more than two years seeking to oust Russian forces from its own territory, Kiev turned the tables on Moscow. Vladimir Putin seemed thrown off guard. In a televised meeting about the incursion, Putin came across as patently not in control of events. The reasons for the Ukrainian offensive remain unclear. It could be an attempt to wear away at the morale of both Russia’s military and its populace, and to boost morale in Ukraine; to undermine popular and elite confidence in Putin’s rule; to
A traffic accident in Taichung — a city bus on Sept. 22 hit two Tunghai University students on a pedestrian crossing, killing one and injuring the other — has once again brought up the issue of Taiwan being a “living hell for pedestrians” and large vehicle safety to public attention. A deadly traffic accident in Taichung on Dec. 27, 2022, when a city bus hit a foreign national, his Taiwanese wife and their one-year-old son in a stroller on a pedestrian crossing, killing the wife and son, had shocked the public, leading to discussions and traffic law amendments. However, just after the
The international community was shocked when Israel was accused of launching an attack on Lebanon by rigging pagers to explode. Most media reports in Taiwan focused on whether the pagers were produced locally, arousing public concern. However, Taiwanese should also look at the matter from a security and national defense perspective. Lebanon has eschewed technology, partly because of concerns that countries would penetrate its telecommunications networks to steal confidential information or launch cyberattacks. It has largely abandoned smartphones and modern telecommunications systems, replacing them with older and relatively basic communications equipment. However, the incident shows that using older technology alone cannot