How to Teach the Lazy Students
Chabi Dhakal
Canada
An individual who enters teaching profession is a deserving character who accepts responsibilities to guide numerous students on the right track by developing the rational and responsible attitudes and behaviour towards life. Every teacher enjoys teaching the active, co-operative, and disciplined students. However, it is a difficult task to handle the lazy students. To teach the lazy students, the teacher should have the idea of simplicity, clarity, attractiveness and effectiveness of the teacher to understand and appreciate the feelings of the students and techniques used to handle and engage all students including lazy ones, effectively, according to their interests.
The preparation of the education materials to support the lesson is important in an initial phase. Lazy students prefer to have fun rather than listening to the lectures of a teacher. So it is essential that you, as a teacher, have to prepare some funny and knowledgeable things related to the topic so that the lazy students are tricked, I mean reached their feelings, and therefore able to enjoy the process of learning. Doing so will help you to reduce the students’ laziness and gradually refresh them, which could motivate their interest in learning. You should not totally depend on your educational materials but also prepare yourself physically and mentally and gain full confidence to handle any kind of problems without mental pressure.
Now you are ready to begin your class. After you enter the class, you will hear greetings from students, so reply to them in a cheerful voice and introduce yourself. This will help you to develop a good teacher student relationship as the bedrock of communication. You will see the lazy students sitting usually at the back of the classroom or at the corner desks rather than sitting in the first row because they may not want to listen to you or give interest to their studies, preferring to engage in their own tasks such as sleeping, playing games on their beautiful iPods, texting their beloved ones or making some paper planes to play with remaining away from the judgement of your vision and they select seats away from the centre of the room. So you should make the effective seating plan keeping the lazy students in the place where you frequently can have eye contact with them and it will help you to make the judgement of their activities. After that you should implement the plan into action immediately. Doing so will help in effective teaching learning process with the proper handling of lazy students.
Now that you have taken time to consider a lively, even humorous approach to your lessons and are well veiled in the classroom dynamics, it is time to place emphasis using the educational materials to set the class into an active learning environment by developing curiosity about the lesson. Remember the students at the back may not try to listen or take part in your discussion about the lesson, so, now it is the time to use your funny educational materials. For example, MR Thapa is teaching topic “Environmental Pollution” in science to grade-5 students. He has a chart of pictures, and he is explaining about environment pollution. In this picture there is a creek; some children are passing nearby the water source, now seen as their toilet, a couple of buffalo are playing inside the water source on the other edge, and a lady seems to fetch water in a container. The Picture looks so funny, but it has the high moral value about the water pollution. Besides all the students in Mr. Thapa’s class are laughing and becoming curious enough to ask questions. Their active participation provides that teaching techniques used by Mr Thapa are effective to make the whole class, including the lazy students, actively discuss the subject matter. Although the educational materials were comical, they contained the real sense of awareness and knowledge to get lazy students involved in learning and understanding the attitudes suggested by the image. So you may use same type of fun techniques to make your class active and knowledgeable.
The proper use of educational materials in a systematic and scientific way creates interests in learning to enable the delivery of quality education. The performance of various eye-catching actions and use of more surprising materials are regarded as the way to create the interest in learning. For example, you may use your overhead projector to illustrate more about the subject matter. You can also use some videos and tutorials about the lesson on your wide screen, which will pull the mind and drag the eyes of every student towards the screen. Visual learning is the best way to teach the lazy students because it makes them involved in learning by developing curiosity. On the other hand, the posters, pamphlets, pictures, diagrams on the side wall also provide extra information at any time, so you should put such things on the side walls.
Group discussion and performance will help all students to involve themselves in group of friends who hold different opinions, exposing the students to understand, appreciate, respect and match their feelings and interests with the friends, classmates having similar or dissimilar types of interests. Also it will help students develop skills of communication and interaction. The teacher should be able figure out the actual interest and opinion about the subject matter from individual or group responses that highlight similar interest. You should focus on making students involved in group to perform different activities in class which broadens the mind. The group work also develops a good relationship among friends and makes them co-operative. So rather than giving a bagful of homework you should try to engage students in classroom activities. The lazy students are not seems to do homework properly, so better give individual or group work to work in the classroom.
Simplicity in the way of teaching, and the language used by the teacher helps the students to understand well. Use of simple sentences and words will help all the students to understand conveniently. So never use the bombastic words or complicated and overly complex sentences, instead explain the lesson in the simple way, which helps to make the students clear about the topic. A lazy student is not likely to exert much effort in decoding the teacher’s lecture or instruction.
The effectiveness of the teacher is based on his or her understanding of the interests and feelings about the lesson. Most likely the students are lazy as they are not interested about the subject matter or they don’t like your way of teaching. So try to understand the feelings of students about subject matter and implement the best way of teaching techniques which they may prefer. Ask a few questions about the topic, but do not pose this question in a serious mood. Never get angry; instead always be in charming mood with your glorious face, which will develop positive feelings in students about you, and many of them will be impressed by your character, and then they may show their interest in learning with you. Listen and respond to them, do not make immediate comments upon hearing the answer from the students. Try to state the facts and possibilities about the lesson, stating facts and possibilities will help the students to understand more about the subject matter. Appreciate their feelings, but never compare their feelings with yours and other student’s thoughts. Comparing the feelings may develop negative concepts towards you, so it is better to try to understand the interests of students, and implement them immediate in action to support the quality of teaching and to handle the lazy students properly.
To make your class awkward, focus on daily lesson planning. Proper lesson planning helps to complete the specified lesson on time, keep in mind that the tortoise never moves as fast as the rabbit. So the lazy students are slow. It is better not to speed up the lesson by focusing and listening solely to the active students. Doing so will make the lazy students feel uncomfortable and full of mental pressure. Always manage the lesson that you are going to teach which will help both teacher and student to go smoothly with lesson properly on time.
Before you finish your class, remember to conclude the lesson and make a note of several points as the key point students should remember. You can post those key points about the lesson on the side walls for quick reference and recall for students. Finally, if you incorporate in to the above techniques and ideas you may soon discover that you no longer have any lazy students, only curious, creative, and engaged pupils.
An informative , reflective article !