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
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