There’s no substitute for the real thing. That’s an important lesson I’ve learned through my years of teaching children. No matter how creative you think you are, or how eloquent you hope to be, mere words can not replace the learning brought about by experiencing the lesson itself.

Take for example, the concept of aerodynamics, drag and lift,  and Bernoulli’s principle. These are very complicated lessons especially if they were approached mathematically. But if you let the students experiment with making aircraft designs and with manipulating wing shapes of their planes, they’d at least get a practical sense of what’s happening. It may not be as profound or as detailed as the algebraic approach, but it’s a more basic and grounded learning – the type that you’d remember because there’s deeper understanding.

Then again, not all lessons could be experienced first hand. There are just some topics that we could only approximate in the classroom – lessons that are just too abstract or too difficult to gain access to, no matter how many used tape drives, or magnets, or old and broken computer parts we ask the children to bring (for hands on activities). For these difficult times, the teacher just has to become the living visual aid himself/herself – a puppet, a clown, a storyteller, a playwright, whatever it takes to drive a lesson home.

It is for this reason, that I got a new-found respect for the profession and for the people who engage in it. If I hadn’t experienced it for myself, I would not have known how hard it is to actually make studenst listen, laugh, participate and learn. I feel so lucky that I’ve had lots of good teachers that taught me well