Accepting the knowledge and then re-echoing it to another person without innovation is an intellectual bulimia. A practice that most of our teachers and other professionals are guilty of.
When we are at school preparing ourselves to be a future teacher, we have been bombarded of many researches and new ways of teaching, which according to those who made it, is effective. Then we graduated, and fortunate enough to be able to practice our profession. A time when the reality check sets in.
When we are at the field, the teachers can be divided into two groups in terms of how they will teach. The first group are teachers who can’t shed off the influence of their teacher when they were young and will be immitating them and adapting the strategy of their former teacher. Their thought pattern is that, what worked before will work now or it is effective, so why try something new.
The second group of teachers are those who are eager to use the strategies that they learned from the university; their mentality would be: this is new, it’ll work, it is better than the old way hence we are better than the old teachers.
These practices are an example of an intellectual bulimia. Absorbing a knowledge and just giving it to others as it is. None of them is wrong. I’d say maybe both are effective but where does it leads us? It leads us to becoming stagnant. It doesn’t foster improvement; it belongs to the “Copy Paste “ culture of today.
To have improvement and continue growing, we must think differently. The reason why we have the likes of Einstein, Newton, or Feynman is because they were not contented with the knowledge they learned and observed. What they did is they questioned the knowledge, used the knowledge to discover, and continued innovating and making a new way for the generations to use.
I encourage our teachers to think differently. Create your own way to effective teaching. Challenge the standard and create a better one. It’s high time for us to change the face of leaning. A time to upgrade the quality of learning. And most of all, is time for us to continue flowing in the river of knowledge that leads towards a higher enlightenment.#
