The Art of Teaching: More Than Just Acting

 The Art of Teaching: More Than Just Acting

By Sahr Ahmed

Teaching is commonly described as performing, and this is quite appropriate. Both require showmanship, the ability to perform on the stage, the ability to appeal to the masses, and attractive means of narrating a story. The findings also show that teachers like actors employ assertive and enthusiastic communication, creativity, and charisma to get their students. Nonetheless, one must say that teaching and performance are not far from each other, yet teaching goes much beyond performance. In its essence; it is about the students as learners, their development, and welfare.

Engaging Through Performance

As much as the actors make the characters come alive, so does a teacher make the subject come alive in class. They also use pedagogy tools such as stories, jokes, or gestures, to try and make a lesson as interesting as possible. For instance, one could remember how a science teacher teaches a lesson on chemical reactions, and in the course of the lesson dressed in a lab coat and goggles for the lesson even though it’s normal for the teacher to dress this way many times it just adds that extra drama to a lesson that many students might not find interesting. If the atmosphere has been made lively, the teachers can be able to spark the interest of their learners.

Likewise, when teaching literature, drama teachers use acting approaches to make the students comprehend better. Possibly when reading a play, they can lead students to perform some scenes, in this way, they are able to get the feel of the characters and understand the emotions and conflicts experienced by the characters. This makes learning fun and entertaining but above all promotes empathy and tolerance among the learners.

The Heart of Teaching

However, performance elements of teaching are much more profound than just entertaining the listeners. The teaching profession is all about interest and concern with the learners’ education. Teachers endeavor to ensure they know all students’ learning profiles aptitudes and learning difficulties. They foster a culture in which a student feels more comfortable to be who he or she is and be able to take a chance.

For example, a teacher who sees a student in her class having difficulty reading may dedicate extra time to rectify the problem by offering corrective teaching in terms of one-on-one teaching and getting books that a particular learner can comprehend. This commitment to the growth of the student shows that teaching involves more than dispensing information; it involves creating passion, and patience and pushing past barriers.

The Reality of Underpayment

Though education is primarily entrusted with the responsibility of preparing the next generation, teachers globally are chasing the RAW reality of being underpaid. This issue is related to both offline and online teaching. In numerous researchers’ work, findings reveal that teacher wages are unreasonable rewards for the education, experience, and responsibility they bear. In other words, such employees, including teachers with master's degrees, may be paid less than comparably situated individuals in other professions.

Consequently, this paper aims to discuss the implications of underpayment as they may be severe. Teachers are not motivated when they are not valued in the school hence they end up becoming more tired of practicing the profession. Consequently, the quality of teaching is impacted. Teachers get overworked and underpaid thus diluting the chances of offering vision personal tutor support that most of the children require to improve on their experience in a learning environment.

The Burden of Work

Teachers around the world are constantly facing the problem of a heavy workload. Being a teacher who works online or offline means that one always has many things to do like developing lessons, correcting assignments, performing usual paperwork, and interacting with parents. Unfortunately, for offline teachers, the management of classes is another challenge that demands power and concentration. But when it comes to online teachers, the question is how to make captivating virtual content, and how to keep children focused in a virtual environment.

The pressures linked with these duties can reduce the fun of teaching for a person. This is a fact that teachers may fail to maintain a creative and energetic approach when they are pressured by so much work and with financial strains. It may make it hard for them to be sociable with students as they would be more focused on how to get the work done instead of concentrating on how they are going to ensure the students are interested in the activities they are doing.

The Effectiveness of Passionate Learning

All in all, the combination of a show and concern allows for providing excellent education. People can recall those teachers who made learning an enjoyable experience and encouraged further inquiry. A great teacher can do miracles – she or he can make students love what they never really did before.

Therefore, as much as teaching can be equated to acting – performing for the learners, at its core, is a creative process boot from the passion and dedication that educators have for learners. Nevertheless, underpayment as well as an overload of work in the teaching profession may lead to a compromisation of the quality of teaching. In our communities, educators constantly dedicate themselves to ensure that their learners gain understanding, develop, and excel in whatever they do. This influence is not limited to the class, they help build future generations of society. By balancing fun-filled fabulous performances to the accurately demonstrated cucurbit, genuine commitment qualifies teaching as one of the most fulfilling careers today despite the prevailing odds teachers encounter.

Teachers especially the newly trained ones are subjected to unfair remuneration this is because underpayment of teachers needs policy change, community support, and advocacy. Here are several strategies that can help improve the compensation and overall working conditions for teachers:

1. Advocacy as an Instrument for Demand for More Money

Government Funding: In particular, teachers and those working in the field of education can advocate for additional subsidies, that would be delivered to public schools at the local, state, and federal levels. Such funds can be channeled towards an increase in teacher remuneration, improvement in teaching-learning resources, and other support staff.

Community Involvement: The support of school funding initiatives can also be obtained through involving the community. Some of these methods may include: using fliers, radio, or social media to educate parents, conducting meetings with parents and the students themselves, and mobilizing support from local business people or other players within the society in order to support education.

2. Union Representation

• Strong Teacher Unions: Teachers’ salaries, benefits, and working conditions are mostly negotiated by unions.”Building the capacity of teacher unions means improved working conditions whether through bargaining for better contracts or contract improvements.

• Collective Bargaining Agreements: If teachers are given the chance to bargain their contracts then the compensation and working conditions may be made fair. Some of the actions that a union can take include demand for an increase in wages based on experience, education, and productivity.

3. Rethinking Pay Systems

• Salary Scales: Part of the process of salary packaging should involve reviewing all previously developed scales of salary and comparing them with other professions that require similar education levels and experience in teaching.

• Performance-Based Pay: Introducing a performance-based wage structure can motivate teachers who work hard in the classroom, performance based wages should be well formulated for the best results to be achieved.

4. Additional Benefits

• Improved Benefits: Negotiating for attractive benefits such as medical, retirement, and leaves will go a long way in helping to attract and retain teachers despite low salaries.

• Loan Forgiveness Programs: Student loan forgiveness for teachers based on tenure, and especially for teachers posted to hard-to-staff schools can be of help in easing financial pressures and attracting people to teaching jobs.

5. Staff Development/Human Resource Development

• Career Advancement: Various ways show any policy resulting in professional growth for the teachers such as mentoring or leadership roles translates into better job satisfaction or remuneration.

• Continuous Learning: Professional development of the teachers is a good idea that will help them to become quality teachers because of the compensation that comes with it.

6. Community and Parental Support

• Engaging Parents: Through positive relationships with parents and the community more support to the teaching fraternity may be obtained. This is true because parent-teacher associations can demand more funds or better salaries at school board sessions.

• Public Awareness Campaigns: Informing people about equity for teachers' compensation and its relation to student outcomes will create demand for higher salaries.

7. Legislative Change

• Policy Advocacy: Some ways of minimizing underpayment are; to supporting the local and state governments to adopt policies that would prioritize education funding. This entails lobbying for a change of policies that would see the workers receive political salaries.

• Accountability Measures: That’s why it is crucial to employ the education funds so that more money will be allocated for the teachers’ salaries and no one would question how those funds would be spent.

Conclusion

Boosting teacher pay is a difficult task through which educators, legislatures, local governments, and interest organizations must unite. Perhaps attention should be paid to such advocacy as the demand for more money for education, strengthening teacher unions, reviewing pay structures, and community mobilization based on a more sustainable and proper remuneration for teachers could be built. In conclusion, an investment in teachers becomes an investment in future education and students' success.