For a Good Myanmar Teacher to Become

 

By Hu Wo (Cuckoo’s Song)

 

IN THE instruction of school subjects in our country, an educator may be a success as a Myanmar, Maths, Chemistry or History teacher in particular to the extent to which he focuses his efforts on this subject. Out of these subject teachers, I believe it is most fortunate that a teacher experiences success in teaching Myanmar. This is simply because a Myanmar teacher will be up the creek without a paddle if he cannot draw attention and teach Myanmar students the Myanmar language to the degree that they show interest in the language. Excellent Myanmar teachers will be able to teach the Myan­mar language so well that their students can be firm believer in learning the language. Thus, the common characteristics of a good Myanmar teacher (SAT) will be described in this article, based on my teaching experience.

 

First of all, I would like to start talking about the intro­ductory chapters of poetry and prose. All high school teachers and students must skim through these introductory chapters be­fore the very poetry and prose teaching-learning activity. The introductory chapters usually make students interested in the following lessons, i.e. poems and prose. Here, introductory chap­ters are just interesting matters to students and it is only poems or prose that teachers have to teach their students. Hence, a teacher should never spend the whole class time (40 minutes now­adays) telling only one introduc­tory chapter. Unexpectedly, if he does so, his teaching will lessen students’ attention momentum towards the very lesson. For in­stance, in a Grade 11 Myanmar poem `ရွှေနှင့်ယိုးမှား ပန်းစံကား´ (Shwe-nint-yoemar Pansagar), a teacher has to tell Panbe Maung Thintel and his sister’s love story as much as needed, not Ko Byutta and Mewunna’s. Great Myanmar teachers make good use of intro­ductory parts to obtain students’ long attention spans in poetry or prose instruction.

 

It is most Myanmar teachers who read and teach poems in a periodic tone. Seldom do many teachers read and sing Myanmar poems of their kind. It may be possible to say that such teaching has been out of date these days. In general, as poems contain sys­tematic patterns of rhymes and rhythms, they are well-readable or even singable. If a teacher sings and teaches a Myanmar poem that is worth singing, his students will enjoy the poem more than normal. For instance, `မဲဇာ တောင်ခြေ´ (Mezataungchay) from Grade 11 Myanmar is full of heart­break and compassion for Lord Letwethondara. But there is one point that should be noticed in poetry reading. Unless a teacher has such a good singing voice, it would be best if he does not sing and teach a Myanmar poem. Good Myanmar teachers read a poem before students, and then they make the entire class read out the poem neatly and rythmnically. As I am aware, most students can see the rhyming patterns of a Myanmar poem pretty easily whether they are read or sung.

 

In learning Myanmar poems, both teachers and students will have to study the word choice and lexical composition of the poems. This is often called `Dissecting the Anatomy of Poetry´, which means seeing the vocabulary and sentence structures of a poem one after another. But on the oth­er side, some Myanmar teachers say that this method destroys the beauty of a poem into pieces. My­self, I am strongly of the opinion that it is merely learner’s freedom of poetry study. Good Myanmar teachers, metaphorically speak­ing, tend to undergo an operation on a poem in the theatre called classroom, not deforming the poem at all.

 

Of course, a poem looks like a well-built little girl. Since po­ems are generally composed of short words and to the point, many poetry learners are always keen as mustard to study the poems. And it is also quite easy to mem­orize a poem by heart. However, prose is not like this. The prose is figuratively a strong and healthy man. Because a language in which thousands of prose can be seen is still living in the world of language, learners are given to pay more attention to prose rather than poetry. Compared with a poem, prose is simple to understand but sometimes totally difficult to write. Although there is no restriction in prose composition regarding the number of words or stanzas, rhyming schemes, and intonation patterns, practically writing the prose cannot arrive at its main theme or aim. But strangely enough, almost all students get bored with learning prose as well as can be under the illusion that they will be able to write similar prose with their eyes closed. In that connection, good Myanmar teachers show a detailed organ­ization of prose arranged from words to sentences, paragraphs and the whole passage instead of overexplaining what the prose means.

 

After teaching poetry and prose, teachers ought to ask stu­dents some questions related to them, especially the learning objective, curiously. At that time, the instructional objectives es­tablished by the students may be different from those prescribed in the curriculum. For language, study is absolute of diverse thoughts and perceptions. If and when the objective of the students has no clear correlation with that of the lesson in the curriculum, the teacher will need to express the very objective of the poem or prose, whether general or specific, where he can agree with other po­etry- or prose-related acceptable feelings and opinions from his stu­dents without a second thought, mainly if he is meant to be a good Myanmar teacher.

 

Finally, good teachers who fully appreciate the Myanmar language like to teach it to their students so that they are getting to adore the language. Also, their Myanmar teaching pedagogy en­ables the students to be mad keen on continuing the language study. They make their students practise essay writing or do spelling and dictation exercises so often. In the main, their handwriting is pretty, neat and tidy, especially without writing system errors or spelling and dictation mistakes. And they like extensive reading besides studying the curriculum. Some even state that an enjoyable learn­ing environment of the school largely depends on Myanmar teachers over there. Therefore, being a Myanmar teacher that does great credit to an educator is a foregone conclusion.