Being Friendly Towards The Students - Yay or Nay? (Part 2)

We’ve talked about the meaning of being a real teacher and why we should to be one in the first part (click here). Now in the second part we are going to talk about the ways to profound the affection between the teachers and the students, and the benefits of being friendly towards them.

The first one, we need to be a Good Listener. Everyone want to be heard, whether it’s about the sadness or the happiness. Once a time, try to spare our time to listen to them. You’ll get surprised and cannot believe, by sparing 5 to 10 minutes of our time for them can increase the teacher-student relationship.

The second one, Talk to Them. we can just ask them about smallest things, like “how’s your day”, “have you eaten?”, ‘what did you just learn” and many more. In my school, i always try to get close to all of my students in every grade start from kindergarten to high school. Not just inside the class, we often have a conversation in our free time and sometimes it happens spontaniously. We meet by accident or they come to see me by purpose. We rarely have a heavy conversation, what we do just an easy chit chat or make a joke. 

The Third one is Appreciate Them. we need to aprreciate whatever they do, even it seems nothing for others, but as the teachers it should be a great thing. Every kid is different, they came from different background, different skills, and different behavior. In looking for their abillity, teachers need to be fair. Try to decrease our negative thoughts over them. There might a lot of naughty kids, but we should stop looking at their black side, we need to spot their white dots and bring it up to the surface so they will gain more confident and make them improve their skills.

Gwen Dewar, Ph.D said in Student-teacherrelationships:

Supportive student-teacher relationships are more than a charming social perk. Studies suggest they help kids adapt, learn, and achieve

I have experiences about being close to my students. The first one is my story about my special needs student, actually she’s not one of a kind, she’s  just being extremely shy towards strangers. No body could make her talk and she’s rarely had a long conversation with other people. In my first try, i got rejected for many times. I talked to her, asked about her condition and so on, but she still had her mouth shut down. I showed my affection towards her everyday for months, till finally that day came. She tried to ask about me, even just a short conversation but it moved me in great ways. I was so speechless and couldn’t believe what just happened. Start from that day, she always come to see me. We have good times together, she often give me chocolates and things. I never intend to receive any gift, i already happy to see her can comunicate quite well now. I tried to tell her to stop giving me such things, but it might her ways to show her love to me. Now she's not that shy anymore, she can go hang out with the upper class, and start to have conversation with them.

She gave me a gift and even wrote me a letter, it was a wonderful day! I just couldn’t stop myself to take the memorable pictures

But it will be different when it comes to the naughty kids like some of my students. Everyone said that they are hard to handle and often do bad things towards others. For couple of times, they asked me to teach them many things through messanger. One of them, who well known as the naughtier one even asked me to speak in english to him, he really want to learn more about english. Actually what i’ve heard for this whole time is this kid had no intention to study at all, but i don't know why when he's with me he shows such interest. It hits me hard, and i got the conclution that this kind of kid just need the teacher’s attention. It’s not their fault if they couldn’t get what the teachers have taught them, but we as the teachers must find the fun ways in teaching so they will get interested in our lessons. Don’t blame it on the students and make many excuses, but we, the teachers are the one who can be blamed.

Above it all, i didn’t say that i have managed all of them and already being a good teacher, no! never! I did many mistakes in my way to get there, and i still learning to find the best methods. Sometimes i failed and get misunderstood in many ways but i talk to myself to not give up, as long as i have this thoughts in my mind, i believe that day will surely comes, when all of my students can respect me as their teacher, family, and friend.