We Don’t Talk Enough About “Bad Teaching”
“Kee Man, you’re the first trainee I have had over 15 years that ever wrote how bad your teaching was in the teaching practice log”.
It was a revelation for my mentor teacher at that time, and I was rather surprised by the remark when I was getting back the log I submitted a week earlier. It was only my second week at the school, and it was horrible! I failed to manage my classes, let alone to teach what I aimed to cover for that week.
“Why did you do that? I’m curious”, my mentor teacher was eager to know. I explained to her that, “I want to be as open and as honest I can be in the log, not only to please you or my university supervisor, but to document my own weakness for improvement. I hope you’re fine with the way I’m doing this log”.
The log for Week 2 was not the only one that I reflected on my failures. I did that almost every week, as being assigned with what was called as a “notorious” class (underachievers from poor socio-economic background or broken families), I learned so much more in helping them than those lectures or practical micro-teaching sessions I had on campus. I realised how isolated our “teacher training” was from the reality of day-to-day teaching. We were taught about the “ideal classroom” when in fact it was fuzzier (or even crazier) than that.
I was glad that she was not the typical “follow-the-template” type of mentor teacher who accepted my way of expressing myself in the log. Back then, we were given a template to fill for our teaching practice log, but I was not following it as I thought it was too rigid and kind of training you to “sugarcoat” a lot of what was happening in the classroom. My mentor teacher was also very supportive in guiding me based on the details I shared in the log, and part of who I am today, I owe to her.
Talking about “Bad Teaching”
This recollection brings me back to the scope of this post, in which as educators, we seem to be comfortable of sweeping our problems or failures in teaching under the carpet. Worse still, there is a tendency to blame the students, the system or whoever we can just to cover up our own failures. We just don’t talk enough about “bad teaching”. As many of my colleagues said, doing so mean you’re a “bad teacher” or “unfit to be in the teaching profession”. Ask any teacher, I can assure you they will be telling you how good they are in teaching and if there are problems, it will almost always be related to students, the administrators or even the ministry!
Wait, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying these factors are not contributing the problems (they could be), but it is very rare to get to know teachers who are more open of their own failures or incompetence. After all, everyone wants to a hero. But in being a hero, our lack of attempts to address our hubris and hamartia (ego and flaws) is the root of our own “downfall”.
Hence, being a reflective teacher isn’t merely about painting the beautiful scenes of your teaching experience, but also in being bold enough to accept the fact that some scenes are nasty and need careful attention to be rectified. And those in teaching profession should be more responsive to the sharing of “bad teaching” by offering support and assistance rather than being judgmental.
If indeed we want to make professional learning community work effectively and improve the quality of our teachers, we need to start talking more openly about “bad teaching”. A healthy exchange of ideas and solutions would definitely encourage more teachers to improve and make an impact in the classrooms, like what my mentor teacher said:
“Many want to be a teacher, but very few want to be an impactful one. They’re happy to be told what to do, what not to do, living paycheck-to-paycheck, without realising many souls are giving their trust and hope on them to guide, to educate, and to lead. A responsibility that not many in this world would want to have”.
And those who want to be an impactful one, you can see how they respond to failures and problems.
