X Things I Learned From Teaching Young Children

#3. Learning Material

A quick review… it is about my teaching experience at a company where I was a teacher to support children’s learning after school.

X Things I learned From Teaching Young Children is a series of articles, starting from 1. Age, 2. Character, and this time, it’s about the learning materials.

3. Learning Materials

1: textbooks

If textbooks were already chosen, all I needed was to just use those. Some students were assigned to have an extra exercise book. That could be either more challenging or less challenging.

Because I was working for this company, I didn’t have to pick any learning materials by myself. Textbooks and exercise books vary depending on the students I had to teach. So I had to do some preparation every time, looking through them to estimate how much time I would spend time on explaining based on an assumption of how much time students would spend on it or have a good understanding of it.

Assumptions based on other students and the student’s previous learning experience had given me a good estimation of spending less time on, and where I had put more effort into explaining them such as providing examples.

For most of the time, the way I teach was adequately suitable, but from time to time students stumbled at an unexpected point. Then I had to always remind myself: “Right, no too much assumption. I need to go through a bit slower.”

2: Exercise books

Some kids may do well on it and some may not. If they don’t, you know where to spend a bit of time. If they do well on it, you can give them a new and advanced example or even ask them to give you an example, and move on to the next topic.

As a novice teacher, I felt the former case was somehow easier for me to write a report about and spend more time on a specific area, either giving them a few more examples or letting them do similar questions after reviewing answers for the previous questions.

I didn’t always remember where they got wrong previously when they finished the similar questions especially when I got a few students to handle them. But if I did remember, I tried to remind them of the point or example again before moving on.

Results of exercise questions after each chapter and quizzes were not meant to discourage them. Those were meant to help them learn.

What I learned was they didn’t usually get a perfect score because students themselves or their parents pick the subject to come here to learn.

Another thing I learned was, If a student gets most of them wrong (i.e. 2 out of 20 questions correct), you probably want to avoid explaining the answers one by one. The student would get bored on the way halfway through. Instead, find a few of the questions that can sum up the idea, or find new examples (could to something students can feel easier to relate to), or even go back to the textbook again to summarize the main points.

Juggling among several students was a difficult part. But the more experience I had teaching students, the better experience I had juggling with multiple students.

I sometimes just felt time went by so quickly while preparing and during the class. Within a limited amount of time, less than 120 minutes, it seemed long, but it wasn’t. There was so little I could do about within that amount of time.

To be continued…

Next will be about topics.