His Fine Face Wasn't Enough...

Throwback to my second year in the university, the school had just gotten new lecturers.  That memorable morning, three young men were introduced to my class, they were going to be our lecturers. There were mixed reactions as they introduced themselves to us; fierce face, fine face and funny face were my own foremost impressions of each of them. Now, I write with a smile, seeing that I indeed would be retelling my experiences of one out of the three in this post.

The first guy, Mr. Fine Face, young, handsome and appeared like he had it all going on; these caused female students to be in awe of him.  Amidst everything, I never seemed to understand some things about him. He would walk into class frowning from the beginning to the end of his lesson, teach a class of 109 students using ‘bedroom voice’ (not his real voice) and refused to take questions at will. Forget, the fine face, we were not just getting what he was teaching, he must have felt like one of the gods.

One day, a fellow dissatisfied course mate went online in search of materials to enable better understanding of the course. He stumbled on the materials our lecturer had been giving to us as notes since the beginning of the course- everything verbatim.  Soon, we began to realise why Mr. Fine Face really never explained to us, he did not have sufficient knowledge and understanding of what he was teaching us let alone making us understand. Again, he was a specialist in dishing out low scores but never seemed to give satisfying answers to back up these grades. As a class, we all came to terms that Mr. Fine Face was not a sound teacher.

Fast forward to the end of the semester, many failed, he was reported to the authorities and many avoided his courses till graduation. In no time, he left lecturing and started an educational business in ‘the abroad.’

Lessons from Mr. Fine Face

• Prepare adequately for your lessons, you need to invest time in your subject area. The depth of your knowledge has a large role to play in earning the respect and trust of the children you teach and their parents.
• Stop seeing yourself as a demi god. You cannot reach the students you teach by running your class as the dictator. They have to be comfortable being in your class.
• Understand that you are there to serve the students and do so unashamedly.
• Re-evaluate your delivery methods and find out if it is working. Your class' feedback helps you know when you are not connecting with your students.
• Be sure you really want to teach.  When the passion is missing, you would never put in your best and with time it will tell on how you do your job. Find what you love doing, if you feel you are stuck with teaching, you better do it well because your integrity is at stake.

Look out for the story of the other  teachers in my next post.