A new teacherly adventure

June 27, 2016

Teachers are motivators as well as facilitators. This is what I often heard when I was still busy working as a teacher in my home country especially when we were having annual teaching training conducted by the department of culture and education in my hometown. Since then, I always thought to myself that children and people of my country, in general, would have been much more educated and civilized had the teachers been really motivators and facilitators conceptually as well as practically. At the same time, however, I also realized that there must be some important as well as influential factors to support the idea so that it becomes a reality. The government as the most powerful one should be the first to be aware of this issue so that they will help teachers to provide adequate facilitation for the students’ learning process. Of course, it is not only about teachers’ salaries but more importantly, providing the required infrastructures for schools as adequate as possible. While the teachers as the agents of the government should wisely use them and work seriously in their field to help students understand whatever they are supposed to learn.

As I was joining my Step Up class, listening to the instructors explaining the materials, I was also learning new things as well as old things that are no longer exist in my educational environments of my home country. I am impressed with how the instructors work hard to facilitate us with handouts even though we can easily print them out from the online course site in the learning center. This is also the first time I learn that homework is not only about filling gaps exercises and the like. Reading the materials that will be discussed in the next meeting is also another kind of homework. Not finish the homework means not ready for the next meeting. In fact, I used to find most of my students felt it is difficult to finish the homework on time due to the lack of facility or the unavailability of material handouts. It might be much easier to facilitate small classes with only five to ten students, but when the class is about twenty to thirty-something students, the scenario will be so much different. Nevertheless, I am afraid that my government does not even know this reality.

The first time I entered the classroom in the Linderman Library of Lehigh University, I was a bit surprised finding that classrooms here combine advanced technology and traditional ones. I remember that during my educational stages, the only stage where the schools used blackboards and chalks was the elementary school. So, starting from my middle school, it has been always whiteboards and board markers. It is just wonderful to me as if I am experiencing my elementary school environment once again for the last twenty-three years! Amazing. I thought that my fellow folks in Indonesia would also be very surprised knowing this. So, I showed them on Facebook and yes, they were really surprised just like I was. I think most people now are just confused about technology as if those blackboards and chalks are no longer technology. People say that this is the era of technology, anything traditional is against technology. In fact, it is just a new development. No matter how advanced the technology we have, if we cannot utilize them optimally it would not be of any benefit to us.

Academic writing is one of my favorite subjects. I have always loved writing since I was still a young girl. I used to write about happy or sad things that happened to me in a diary I made by myself. It was not something academic, I know, but it was a good start to train my brain and my hand for writing. When I was finishing my Bachelor's education, the hardest days I ever had at that time of my life was when working on my thesis. I was not just writing simple or even silly words about my daily life, I was working on academic writing and they are totally different.

When I was writing in a diary, words just went off my mind and landed on my diary papers. I did not have to think of word choice, organization, coherence and cohesiveness, and so on. This does not apply to the thesis I was working on when struggling to achieve my Bachelor's degree. There were lots of pressures, academic as well as non-academic. My father really wanted me to finish my studies as soon as possible and I could understand it because it had been more than four years for me as an undergraduate student. I should have stopped putting any burden on him for paying my tuition fee, etc. Sometimes, out of his own despair, he suggested me to ask for someone’s help. What he actually meant was paying someone to make a thesis for me, which was an extremely unacceptable thing for me. So I just tried to ignore him and tried to relax while thinking of any possible ways to solve my problem.

For your information, I was analyzing the social critique in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. It was a great novel about Colombian history written in the magic realism genre. During the process of my thesis arrangement, I was so amazed that actually I was not only learning English but also other disciplines such as history, sociology, and even philosophy or ideology. Through Marquez’s novel, I learned a bit about American history like a historical event well known as the “banana strike massacre” that happened in Boston during the conservative reign of the Spanish government. I also learned about social theories from Max Weber, Carl Marx, and others for my literature review. So I began by reading a more than five hundred pages novel while taking notes and highlighting important parts that might be my quotation data, translating, summarizing and of course, analyzing. This all is exactly why writing on a diary will never be equal to academic writing.

Eventually, after working so hard for almost a year, I finished my thesis after defending it in front of my professors with a very satisfying grade. I felt so proud and excited as well as relieved. Since then, I have always been interested in academic writings and doing every little thing that might be able to help me improve my writing skills and provide me opportunities to write more. After waiting for almost ten years, I am probably one of the happiest people in the world of education today as I am now studying at one of the best universities in the world, in a super-power country. So, this is the opportunity for me to pursue one of my dreams to be a qualified writer, especially in English. So happy that the instructor is highly talented and smart. Wonderful!