by Anup Dixit

Created on: April 08, 2009

Whether you are a teacher, or a manager, at the end of the day, you have to handle human beings. A teacher has to handle younger people, and a manager has to handle older people. In either case, if one desires to be successful, I suppose one has to first understand the psychology or the mindset of the people one is supposed to handle. In the case of a teacher, one has to understand how the minds of people in the age group range of 4 - 20 years would behave, accept or reject opinions. What would be their preferences? How do we motivate them to concentrate or focus on school activities? How do we convince them that following their teachers' advice would benefit them in the long run?

Before proceeding further, I would request my dear readers to make one assumption - majority of our problems are common in nature. Usually, people of the same age group in one era, face similar problems and desire similar solutions. Of course, there will be certain very peculiar problems or issues with some people but they will be much fewer.
Now, how do we judge or analyse the kind of problems that children (or people in the age group 4-20 years) will face generally. To understand this, we need ourselves to first go down memory lane, when WE were in this age group, and try to recollect what were the issues that made us happy or sad. Further, were there any things that made us happy then, but now we realise that we were wrong then? The more we recollect our mindset at that age, then based on above assumption, it will be all that much easier for us to understand children, and thereby handle them.
For example, in our childhood, we used to desire the most expensive toys, but now we realise that it is incorrect to spoil a child's habit by flooding him with expensive toys - reason being that by doing so, we are not helping him to understand how to handle money wisely. At that time our parents scolded us, and simply told us that it is incorrect on our part to make such excessive demands. However, what we should understand from such experiences is that a child will not know what is right or wrong unless someone takes time out and explains to him, in detail about the same. The child will have tons of questions which we must be ready to answer. You can do that only if you have loads of patience. So the first and foremost quality in a good teacher (or a parent) is PATIENCE.
Another area of concern in children is that they will first want to play, watch TV or browse the net but what about studies?

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>