Teaching with empathy

TTUTA

IN MOST, if not all, of our classrooms there are children who are dealing with a multiplicity of emotional and social issues that are not conducive to learning. Not surprisingly they bring these issues to school with them, as invisible textbooks. These are the silent subjects on their timetables that teachers simply cannot ignore, as overwhelming as it might be.

Children do not have the coping mechanisms that most adults would have developed. Their life experiences are too short for them to even understand their circumstances or make sense of them.

If children cannot deal with their social and emotional deficits, they will act out and display behaviours that constitute cries for help. Teachers in the classrooms need to recognise some of these behaviours for what they are, and deal with children with empathy, so that we do not lose them – for if we do it is nigh impossible to get them back.

For many children, sitting in the classrooms with their “issues” weighing down on them, school means nothing. Education is no longer relevant, because it fails to address their basic needs. These are the children who will fight, skip school, smoke, do drugs, even join gangs depending on the vice that reaches them first.

If we are to evolve as a society, reduce crime and produce better citizens, we must reach these children, for they are the most vulnerable ones and they need priority attention.

If schooling does not become relevant to our at-risk youth of today, they will very likely become the criminals of tomorrow. By this time they will become more difficult to reach and their social dysfunctionality more difficult and expensive to correct.

In our classrooms we have children who will become proud professionals but there are also the dancers, athletes, tailors, artists, mechanics, pannists, and costume designers. But our education system has lost touch with a large section of our school society. Future pan arrangers, calypsonians, musicians, actors and dancers are sitting in our classrooms struggling to reconcile their innate talents while we demand they work out quadratic equations.

A future mechanic is anxious to rush home to dismantle an engine, but first has to finish, in class, a 500-word essay on the rise and fall of the Prussian Empire. A future Olympian, who participated in a track meet the day before, and who is tired and sleepy, has a double period of science to get through, and then has training after school. We must resist the temptation to dismiss them as distracted, careless, or lazy.

We have forced these children, with multiple intelligences, and varied talents, to write a high-stakes exam at the end of primary level that, as President Weekes hinted, is really designed to maintain an elitist status quo.

Our children are then placed into secondary schools that offer more standardised academic instruction, where if you cannot cope you become frustrated, act out, drop out and ultimately fail. We cannot truly teach them if we don’t know them. While not denying the importance of academic pursuits, isn‘t it passing strange that having invented the steel pan we do not have a pan academy? We have the National Academy for the Performing Arts, north and south campuses, but to what extent is the curriculum and high-stakes examinations aligned to these magnificent facilities and the revenue-earning potential we envisaged when we built them?

While we cannot all occupy the best societal tiers, we can all try to occupy our tiers to the best of our abilities. If our children feel accomplished, if their talents and abilities are duly recognised and nurtured, and if they achieve some level of accomplishment at what they can do, and love to do, they will give back their very best efforts. If education becomes relevant to them, they will find their niches, and they will produce and add value to society.

Our schools, however, are not places where children find their niches. They are places where we try to place children into the niches that exist and when they don’t fit we certify them as failures. Until we finally face that reality, we will continue with this broken system and produce a fractured society.

But for the moment, while we have the children in our classrooms, let us recognise their frustrations, try to look beyond the behaviours and find the heart of the child within. This might just be our biggest contribution to our education system.