Teaching the new kids today

Last November, I took a part time job teaching Calculus to Senior High School students in Ateneo de Cebu. Anyone who knows me from high school or college knows how much I enjoy explaining things. Up until last November, my audience had been limited to classmates, tutees, friends and family. As this time around, I'd be teaching Grade 11 students, I knew that these kids wouldn't be like my classmates or my family or my friends. This was mentioned to me over and over and over again by practically everyone who knew these kids.

This new generation of students grew up with technology readily available to them as younger kids. I grew up in a time when we needed to get those floppy disks (the big 5" ones, not the smaller 3.5" ones) for computer class,. I grew up in a time when internet was really slow and practically unusable, when e-books weren't yet a thing, when having a cellphone (even the clunky ones) was absolutely banned in school.

 

We needed this for computer class. #thiswasathing

Naturally, I would have to expect having to talk to kids who aren't "speaking my language". I could not assume that what worked for me when I was in 1st year college would necessarily work for them. This is one lesson I learned the hard way after I gave them their first long test.

You see, being in UP, the test questions were never the same as the questions given during the tests. In the rare cases they were, we didn't learn as much. The teacher would teach us how to find x, for example but ask us to find y in the exam. All the competencies were in place, it was simply a matter of how to use the competencies. Being brought up this way, I decided it would a great learning experience if I did the same thing. Looking back, however, I think my students did learn a lot from the first long test I gave them.

One of their first assumptions about me were that my exams would be easier than their previous teacher's exams and boy were they wrong. I wanted to let them experience the kinds of exams I did - where I'd learn more while taking the exams and I knew I wasn't being spoon fed the solutions. I remember seeing their faces after the exam looking so defeated. But I take pride in knowing they quickly learned their lessons.

Succeeding test results were still low but they gradually went higher and higher and I'm proud to say that my first batch of students did end up learning from their time in class. I hope I taught them more than calculus though. I hope I taught them hard work as most of my students aren't going to be using calculus as much as the others. But all of them will be using hard work throughout their entire lives.