Each one of us can be defined as a student or a pupil. When we give life to a child, we become teachers, educators. Thus, most of us walk the way from a student to a teacher remaining a pupil. The first our teachers are our parents. As we grow, some new teachers come in our way, they are the teachers from our kindergarten, our school, then our college, and so on – life continuously teaches us. And what it tells us is that pedagogy is a science for everybody.
Quite often you can hear them saying that teaching is an art. Usually what we associate with this word is the theater, music, and painting. Can we add teaching to this list or it is a science after all. Let us try and see.
The science is an activity in collecting and studying facts, their explaining, exploring, measuring, proving. The art is taking an attention, forming an attitude, educating creativity, developing thinking. The science and the art have something in common as well as some differences. They complete each other. That is why we can consider teaching both art and science. If we unite the goals and tasks of both the science and the art we can understand the problems and the purposes of the teaching, which are forming an all-round personality.
The education process is very complicated, but the interesting one. You cannot just be a teacher knowing all the teaching techniques. Being a teacher means to be a creative person because a teacher has to be able to add something to the object for his students to get interested in it, understand it, and remember it when there is a necessity. Of course, a student must want to learn, but a teacher must also have what it gets to be an educator. And that is where the art comes into play.
Let’s talk about the art of theater and cinematography. Many years of teaching the same object, it is easy to turn it into a routine. But will it be effective? Will the students like it? Hardly so. In this case, a good teacher is the one who can find the ways to avoid any routine. A good teacher is an actor before all, who knows how to turn his lesson into play, which his students will most certainly remember. It does not matter if it would be a math, history or English; what is important is that students keep the interest for such plays to come.
What teaching has in common with music? The most efficient technique a teacher uses is repetition, which is known to be the mother of skill. To not to be annoying for his students, teachers must learn from musicians how to repeat. Variation, which is one of the musical forms, can be exactly what a creative teacher is looking for. For the first time, a teacher presents an object in a usual manner, and later he or she adds some new information each time the lesson repeated. The essence of the experience always stays intact, but the presentation can vary provoking new interest.
Painting, statuary art and poetry are the techniques similar to the teaching. Every teacher, knowing the general methods, create his own, find a new strategy and tactics to approach the students. He has his style, artisanship, which he develops into an art. The lessons of a good teacher are a real performance that can hypnotize his audience, to reach the most remote corners of the student’s souls. During the class, a teacher is an actor, performer, artist and painter, poet and sculpture. The purpose of the educator is to create, to try, to invent, in such a manner waking in the student’s ability to create.
The teaching process today is a teacher’s creative prerogative. There can only be progress in this process when the students are driven by the interest in the object, with the lessons and outclass studies bringing new information, and the students know how to use it. Only a creative teacher can bring up an original personality.