LEARNING HOW TO FORGIVE STUDENTS UNWILLING TO LEARN AS A TEACHER

Hello friends, it feels very good to be here again for this week prompt. The month is running very fast and I am just imagining when we started this month of March and today we have gone really far.

For my first topic for this week I want to go with forgiveness. The word forgiveness is the act of forgiven. To forgive itself means to pardon someone of what wrong he or she has done against you. Be it knowingly or unknowingly. Sometimes we feel that we won't forgive someone because he knows what he is doing. But then I think we need to consider some factors when we are dealing with humans.

I learnt a very big lesson about forgiveness as a teaching practice student. I am a 400 level student of Ahmadu Bello University. A well know and reputable university in Nigeria. When we get to 400 level we started preparing to go for our teaching practice because it is compulsory especially as a student under Education. With all the joy in my heart I was ready to meet with all the students that I will be assigned to teach. I'm a language arts student and that gives me the opportunity of teaching English language. That field makes it possible for me to meet with all the students in a classroom because English as we all know is a compulsory subject for every student.

I was posted to the school of my choice, and work began in all seriousness. But guys you can imagine what I met there when I resume. I received the first shock the first two weeks when I discovered that more than half of my SS 2 students that I was assigned to teach don't know how to read and write. So, at first I was confused and don't know how to start helping them. I decided to organize a little reading class during their break that takes up to 30 minutes. And friends I had to go and drag them from their classes to come join for the reading. I did that for the first two weeks and I became tired and don't know what else to do. The school itself is not helping matters. As an English teacher I enter class only twice a week to teach the students, so how do you think that the students will learn? I couldn't just imagine it. I decided to calm down after about three weeks when I noticed that the students are not interested in learning how to read and write.

HOW I FINALLY LEARNT HOW TO FORGIVE THE STUDENTS.
Aside that the reading class I tried organizing did not work, even during their Norma lessons most of the students are not even ready to learn. They won't copy note into their Note books so that they can go and read at home. Another most annoying thing is that most of them will not even do their assignments at home. If any assignments is giving to them and you give them a particular day to submit the assignment, most of them will not come to school on that set day. This has been my challenge so far.

I was so angry with the students that I was actually looking for a way to deal with them. Then I read in the news paper how a teacher in one of the states flogged his students to death. Ahhhhn! When I saw this I decided to advise myself to mind my own business oh. Just do what brought you here for three months and go. Don't come and kill people's children here in the name of corrections and punishment. That sounds very good to me and I decided to forgive them for not been serious students and manage them for the period I was asked to teach them so that we can part in peace. I told myself that even when I was a child I displayed some level of stubbornness and today I have changed. If we give some of them a little chance they will change and become better.

Lessons learnt from my experience.

Patient is very important in life. We need to give people the opportunity to change.

Love. When we show people love, it affects them more than when we want to correct then out of anger.

All images belongs to me.