Enjoy it, learn it

  Enjoy it, learn it

  Yang Fang

   Education seems to be the excellent theme and issues in movies. The movies celebrate the unique bond between teacher and pupil. In movies as in life, a teacher plays many roles for a student: substitute parent, friend, counselor, social worker, authority figure, rebel, and rival. But mostly teachers and students inspire and bring out the best in each other. The teacher helps the students find and express themselves, survive, mature, and discover the joy of learning. And the students add extra meaning to their teacher’s life. Maria, the heroine of the movie “the Sound of Music”, investing the character with telling detail and moving moments that actually make her the heart of the movie, showed us the student-centered teaching method. Classroom activities and materials should utilize meaningful contexts of genuine communication with persons together engaged in the process of becoming persons.

   It is an uplifting and poignant drama about one woman’s desire to enrich the lives of her and the people around her. The script is full of interesting situations and characters, which are all very well-played. Maria, in the movie, was brought up in an abbey. Different from traditional nuns, she was by no means isolated or gloomy. She loved the nature, loved the life, and loved her motherland. She was full of confidence to face vary difficulties. From the reference checks, it confirms that she has a positive attitude and influences those around her.  Once she was too concentrated to the natural scene that she went back to the abbey late. Facing the punishment from the abbey mother, she was brave enough to struggle to prove herself and strive for a more enlightened future.

   In the movie, she was sent to be a tutor for seven children, whose mother passed away several years ago, and whose father was a famous rich and respectable captain. The eldest was 16 and the youngest was only 5 years old. Children at these ages were naughty and lively. But it was unimaginable that the father was too strict with his children and he always forced them to do everything just like he trained his underlings. For example, hearing their father’s strange whistle, the children got up, had dinner, or went to bed immediately. They were so strongly against this kind of control that one of them pretended to be a dumb. They loved their father, but were so repressive that they expected their father would be busy with his work forever and wouldn’t come back.

   Although they looked forward that the adults would understand and communicate to them freely and nondefensively, they regarded each tutor as a threat. To Maria, they as usual played jokes and trick on her, such as put a bur on her chair. They wanted to drive her away in this way. But Maria was different from the formers, she was knowledgeable, brave and full of confidence. In the understanding of children, she didn’t criticize the children or report it to their father. On the contrary, she interacted in an interpersonal relationship in which the children and her joined together to facilitate learning in a context of valuing and prizing each individual in the group. In this way, she lowered the defenses that the children built to protect themselves. The hostility was lessened by means of supportive community. Given a nonthreatening environment, the children formed a picture of reality that is indeed congruent with reality, and will grow and learn. Maria, as a true counselor, centered her attention on the children and their needs. In the end, she not only obtained the children’s respect, but also their father‘s love. 

   This gives us a full picture of the depth and breath of human learning. Our previous system of education, in prescribing curricular goals and dictating what shall be learnt, denies persons both freedom and dignity. It is only to impose limits and boundaries. Carl Rogers’ humanistic psychology has had a significant impact on our educational or pedagogical context. He had more of an affective focus than a cognitive one. Rogers carefully analyzed human behavior in general, including the learning process. He studied the “whole person” as a physical and cognitive, but primarily emotional, being. The “fully functioning person,” according to Rogers, lives at peace with all of his feelings and reactions; he is able to be what he potentially is; he exists as a process of being and becoming himself. The age of the learners is very important. Research suggests that children are more disposed to learning activities that incline towards acquisition rather than towards learning. That is, They are better at picking up knowledge implicitly, rather than learning it as a system of explicit rules. This fully functioning person, in his self-knowledge, is full open to his experience, is without defensiveness, and creates himself anew at each moment in every action taken and in every decision made.

   Rogers’ position has important implications for education. The focus is away from “teaching” and toward “learning”. The goal of education is the facilitation of change and learning. Learning how to learn is more important than been “taught ” something from the “superior” vantage point of a teacher who unilaterally decides what shall be taught. Learning-centredness, that is, giving the learner more responsibility and involvement in the learning process. This often achieved through discovered learning activities (for example, where learner works out rules themselves) and though groups work as opposed to the traditional teacher-fronted lesson. 

   Human beings are emotional creatures. At the heart of all thought and meaning and action is emotion. Our knowing, understand, meaning are all influenced by our emotion, which is one characteristic philosophical phenomenon in our humanity.            

   The affective domain is the emotional side of human behavior, and it may be not only juxtaposed to the cognitive side, but also germane to cognitive. They are both opposites and complementary to each other. The affective domain includes many factors. The positive emotions (such as motive, self-esteem, empathy, joy, confidence etc.) may have direct or indirect effect on the learners’ cognition. The learners who are optimistic and broadminded will attend the learning activities energetically. On the contrary, negative emotions (such as anxiety, tense, doubt, anger, timidity etc) may lead to decreased motivation and inhibit their potential development. Yet, the teacher (the counselor) needs to be ware that everyone has both positive and negative emotions.

   As for increasingly recognized the importance of the affective domain, in order for any learning to take place, as has already been noted in Maria’s model, what is first need for us teachers is to be real and genuine, discarding masks of the superiority and omniscience. As we have seen, a prerequisite for learning is attention. So the efficacy of a learning activity can be partly measured by the degree of attention it arouses. This means trying to exclude from the focus of the learners’ attention any distracting or irrelevant details. Attention without understanding, however, is probably a waste of time, so efficacy will in part depend on the amount and quality of contextual information, explanation and checking. None of these, however, will be sufficient if there is a lack of motivation. The children and youth at different levels of development have varying social and emotional capabilities. They remain or keep some childish characters. E.g.: 1.they are naivete and artlessness; 2.they are short of endurance and wear. 3. They are fickle in affection. 4. they are anxious to success. 5. they are eager to obtain more knowledge. 6 they are week in self-sanction 7. they are strongly depended on their parents or teachers, and so on. The point is to know what is developmentally typical behavior.So the teachers, as facilitators, must provide nurturing and meaningful contexts and vary pleased methods to make them enjoy it. It is the teacher’s job to choose tasks and materials that engage the learners. Tasks and materials that are involving, that are relevant to their needs, that have an achievable outcome, and that have an element of challenge while providing the necessary support, are more likely to be motivating, than those that don’t have these qualities. There was a scene in the movie. Maria wanted to teach them the notes at first, so she played guitar and sang, ”Let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start. When you read you begin with A B C, when you sing you begin with do- re- mi-. The first three notes just happen to be do- re- mi-.” She stopped here, because it was too abstract, and beyond the children’s ability, though the notes are analogous to the alphabet. She thought it over, and then came up a good idea. The famous song was composed. “Doe, a deer, a female deer. Ray, a drop of golden sun. Mi, a name, I call myself. Far, a long long way to run. Sew, a needle pulling thread. La, a note to follow sew. Tea, a drink with jam and bread…”Because the sounds were homonym, and the context was easy to understand and remember, she succeeded in teaching, while the children succeeded in learning.

   And second, teachers need to have genuine trust, acceptance and a prizing of the other person---the students---as a worthy, valuable individual and no see their mission as one of rather programmatically feeding students quantities of knowledge which they subsequently devour. The new type of relation between the teacher and the students require us to be the students’ closed friend and a guide. As teachers, we should not act as an authority, but to utilize our personality charm, cordial words, spontaneous motion, and lively expression. The latter practice fosters a climate of defensive learning in which learners try to protect themselves from failure, from criticism, from competition with fellow students, and possibly from punishment. The teachers’ admission and successful experience will enhance the children’s confidence and courage, then stimulate their enthusiasm, and lead to high integrative motivation to learn. Moreover, there is much greater skepticism nowadays as to the extent that teaching causes learning. This need not undermine our faith in the classroom as a good place for learning. We now know a lot more about what constitute the best conditions for learning. If teachers can’t directly cause learning, they can at least provide the optimal conditions for it. Of course, no learning situation is static, no class of learners is the same: not only are their needs, interests, level and goals going to vary, but their beliefs, attitudes, values will be different, too. Thus, an activity that works for one group of students is not necessarily going to work for another. It may simply not be appropriate. Hence, any classroom activity must be evaluated not only according to criteria of efficiency, but also of appropriacy. With the right combination of consultation, negotiation, and learner training, even the most entrenched attitudes are susceptible to change. The teacher is encouraged to be both adventurous as well as critical, when considering. In fact, the criterion of a successful class is not how much you have taught, but how much the learners have practiced and how much they have learnt.

   The students’ perfect personality is one goal of language teaching and learning. The students’ perfect personality should include the perfect emotion. The perfect emotion is one target of the “full functioning person”. Emotion and cognition are germane to each other. During teaching procedure, the artery of stimulating the students’ perfect personality is to develop the students’ positive emotion and transfer or delete their negative emotion. The teachers should recognize and appreciate them to enhance their confidence, mediate to reduce their anxiety, stimulate their motion to increase their enterprise, enjoy success to preserve their permanent interest, strengthen and reinforce the connect with the students to empathy.

   Teachers with these characteristics will not only understand themselves better but also be effective teachers, who, having set the optimal stage and contest for learning, will succeed in the goals of education.       

   Teachers’ movie legacy has a profound effect on us, it inspires us to look beyond the imagine of what is, and consider of the teaching and learning process and life itself.

   Thanks to Maria.