Teacher personality: How it affects Learning

January 27, 2012, 7:43 pm , The Island.


By Vijaya Jayasuriya

Rohana R. Wasala’s (RW) learned discussion (The Island 20.01.12) of how teacher’s pedagogic qualities determine the academic attainment of students indeed merits a dialogue among educationists at a time like this when every imaginable aspect of our life is adversely affected by those who fail to make a mark on schooling. While Mr. Wasala mainly concentrates on the positive aspect of learning I wish to focus my attention on the negative side of it – how bad qualities of teachers directly affect the post-scholastic lives of learners.

The dictionary explanation of ‘disposition’, the basis of RW’s theorization being "the natural qualities of person’s character", this particular human tendency is most probably part and parcel of the umbrella – term ‘personality’ which encompasses a wide range of other aspects of human behaviour as well – their physical appearance and other idiosyncrasies like the multiple ranges of reaction to crises etc which make a great deal of impact on anyone or anything they are dealing with. This is of particular interest in regard to education of children as childhood or even adolescence happen to be a period of any individual which is heavily marked by extreme tenderness and formative nature so that even the slightest variations in the behaviour of their teachers tend to ‘make a dent’ in their personality.

It is this very volatile nature of students that makes it imperative for teachers to be cautious in their dealings with their charges, and for the authorities and the trainers to mould the character of trainee teachers in such a way that they will develop fully-fledged personalities so that their students in turn are not misled in the process of classroom teaching as well as outside of it. Out of the three domains in the sphere of child development cognitive (mental or intellectual) psycho-motor (physical) and affective (to do with values), the first two areas appear to be receiving a lot of weightage in the present system of education, sadly to the detriment of the last, the character development of the student. The outcome is a society full of corruption what with bogus politicians, corrupt bureaucrats, mercenary doctors, masquerading social workers and even lethargic and bluffing teachers.

On a certain TV quiz programme the other day a student delivered a speech charged with unnecessary emotion and even went on to thump the table before him with his clenched fist as if he were speaking in a political meeting. It was an extremely unpleasant sight unbecoming of a student speaking before an audience of teachers and even high-ups in educational administration. It was, of course, not the fault of the student himself but that of an ignorant teacher who trained him. (Even the texts of the speeches in this programme are written by teachers and delivered sometimes casting glances at the text though they are ultimately tagged by the quiz-master as "students’ own ideas"!

It behoves the admin authorities to take such teacher(s) concerned to task substantially. But far from such punitive/reformatory action the director in charge of the region was seen greatly amused by the student’s behaviour. The saddest part of this episode was that this speaker was adjudged the winner of the competition!

Ethics and social values should be inculcated in students from their very formative years through the behaviour and example by teachers. As RW has mentioned, most of our own teachers who taught us more than a half century ago were real paragons of virtue worthy of emulation and thus they made us follow the footsteps.

As I have referred to in these columns sometime back , we had a fine model of a master named ‘Marshal Mahaththaya,’ who came to school clad in white coat and cloth.

He taught us Sinhala. His main activity was reading out to us books by the doyen of Sinhala literature Martin Wickramasinha. While holding the novel Rohini in his left hand he used to act out all the incidents appearing in the book which we enjoyed immensely and made us subsequently great lovers of literature almost devouring books in the little library at our temple from a very early age.

The remarkable characteristic of our master that made an indelible mark on was his extreme integrity and generosity. When he noticed anyone of us being unable to write (on slates) owing to the wasted writing stick (gal kuura) he promptly got a replacement sending an older boy to the nearby boutique with his own money.

He often used to advise us on humanitarian qualities and even went on to relate little episodes from his own life illustrating them. In one such story he was a teenager taking the lunch for two men working in his father’s worksite. While crossing a river on a bridge he fell off the bike in to the river with the meal basket still held fight in his hand. He was struggling to get off water while his clothes were all soaked in it, but he never wanted to let go of the basket and held it high with difficulty, ‘I took the meals to the site with my clothes still wet’ he concluded and advised us that we should never let down those depend on us in any situation.

Mr. Batapolahewa was our class master and the wood-work teacher at Karandeniya Central School. He was working hard like a real carpenter in his spacious workshop clad in a special kit except when he taught us in the class. One day when we had to stay over for an afternoon class, one of our mates had not brought his lunch and noticing his languishing mood our teacher asked him the reason for it. When we said he had not brought his lunch our master took out his own lunch pack and gave our friend half of the string-hoppers in it saying jokingly. "Don’t come without lunch again to attack my lunch pack!"

When our school bus did not arrive one day and the passenger buses on the route were packed to capacity, we nearly two hundred students walked back home trudging three to five miles. Our teachers who could have travelled by bus accompanied us in the walk singing with us all the way!

While we imbibed all these humanitarian values from our masters in the good old days, unfortunately the present day students rarely get such opportunity to emulate their teachers. I recently happened to come across a leading Ayurvedic physician who had retired as the Vice Principal of the very institution where he had learnt the profession and is currently running his own factory producing ayurvedic medicaments. He proudly claimed that he had a large number of students serving people all over the country. This is quite possible in medical profession as doctors’ practices only involve treating patients and not moulding characters. In teacher, however, this is indeed the other way round according to my own experience as most of my students who learnt the craft from me, running into thousands in number, have today proved to be frauds! Those who wrote to me after taking up their first appointment saying "Sir, you taught us not only teaching but how to lead a humanitarian life" have become shysters who do not want even to face me.

This is the outcome of the forces within the profession itself that exert a strong negative influence on novice teachers. This tendency exists not only at school level but in the Colleges of Education themselves where those who claim to be top professionals with high academic achievements are without principles.

When a lecturer arrives at a class ten minutes late and sometimes makes excuses to students to get ‘forty winks’ keeping her head on the table, that single ugly action represents a type of role that misuses its elevated position as a privilege to engage in other types of misbehaviour as well. When authorities give priority to least qualified individuals ignoring professionals in making appointments to top posts in such institutions, the trainees, too, take the cue from such scams and tend to follow suit anticipating a leisurely and yuppified life rather than becoming real professionals with little glitter in their private life.

Dr. Alice Roberts of Birmingham University has made an epoch-making declaration (The Island: World View: 23.01.12) that students taking science subjects, too, should have a foundation in arts and humanities in order to be more ‘rounded individuals’. In this sense, the elimination of Sinhala literature as a subject in our secondary school has already proved to be a disastrous step taken by authorities several decades ago. We as primary students in early fifties learnt to look critically at human behaviour through the reading of literature where as the present-day student has been sadly denied this opportunity.

To make teachers responsible professionals the high-ups in the education hierarchy, particularly the training institutions should be resource personnel with a high degree of integrity. Teacher training courses should be revamped in such a way as to lay additional emphasis on value education (as the Prof. Roberts has emphasized). The school curriculum has to be re-planned to include Sinhala literature as a main subject from junior secondary levels paving the way for students to make a thorough study of the work by our local authors. Verses from our traditional books like Loweda Sangarawa, Sirith Maldama, Subhashithaya and Lokopakaraya should be taught from primary level at school as was done during the early 1950s.


(Just as the sandal-wood well-known the world over for its scent sends out its fragrance if cut and pressed, great people with good qualities and intelligence never get frustrated even when ill-treated).

(Subhashithaya)