Trying to start teaching.
First student – my younger sister.
This is the first time I’m doing something like this. It’s gonna be an experiment for both of us.
They say that the first thing you have to do is to know your pupil. Know his/her background. Once you know their frame of reference, you can then go in and begin to widen the frame from the inside.
What I want to teach her is not taught in any school. You won’t find it in any school material. No school I know of even touches the important topics of ‘semantics’ and ‘the scientific method’. Schools are not there to make people critical thinkers. They are there to make people fit into the society they perpetuate. What I am going to try to do is to initiate that ‘bug’ of critical thinking in her brain.
For starters, I need to get her to want to get taught by me. The challenge is to get her trust and to get her attention. Once I have her trust, I hope she will be comfortable to share her background with me. Note that I haven’t seen her for the last 2 years. So I practically know nothing about her. Also, as self-righteous as most teens are, she doesn’t want to be taught by me. So to do this, I am going to ask a number of people, who have some credibility with her, to try to convince her to give it a try. These include her father, her bhabhi and her best friend. The formula here is not to be coercive, but to try to establish a sense of mystery in her head, to get her curious, to make her think that her brother knows something that is going to benefit her greatly. Once that is established, she may agree to sit with me for a lesson.
Next up is for me to get her to tell me everything there is to know about her. This is essential because I cannot even think of beginning to teach until I know her frame of reference. And this can only be found by getting to know her background, something only she herself can share with me. The method I am going to use is to try to make her comfortable about talking to me. Due to unknown reasons, she has closed herself off from most of her family, including me. I don’t know the reasons, but I think I can make a guess. I think it’s because she thinks none of us understands her values, her hopes and dreams, etc. So I would have to make her understand that I ‘want’ to understand her, and that it cannot happen without her support. I would have to tell her that I think she is a very intelligent person and that I think I can also learn something from her experiences. Or maybe something like “if you cooperate, you might be in for the ride of your life!!” Lets see.
As I said, I have no experience at all, and I have taken, as a first assignment, a ‘very’ difficult student. I do not know if I will succeed, but I know that if I don’t try, my sister will not grow into the truly creative and intelligent human being that she is capable of becoming. Wish me luck!
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