By Rachid Khouya
By Rachid Khouya
Morocco World News
Smara, Morocco, February 5 ,2013
My last participation in the “Obserrvatoire Nationale des Droits de l’Enfant’s” (the National Observatory of the Right of the Child) national activity under the theme of equal opportunities of access to knowledge in the Moroccan capital Rabat, under the patronage of princess Lala Meryam, taught me that we should do a lot to understand and motivate childhood and our youth and save them from delinquency.
Changing the way we view children and students should take place as soon as possible, in addition to the way we teach and evaluate them. The solutions are within our students and teachers’ chests and minds. All what politicians and policy makers need to do is to open their ears and listen to the voices of the youth and their educators.
What made Bouzinka’s event historical and successful was that the teachers who attended were chosen by their students who were members of the child’s parliament. These parliament members today work in highly respected places and are participating in the development of the country’s economy and culture as engineers, doctors, judges and economics, while others are still continuing their professional studies.
In the past, whenever there was a conference or a meeting in Rabat, the people of the academies and the delegations of the ministry of education selected only those teachers they liked. They never sent the people who deserved to be there and who have earned such participation their work hard with their students.
This time, the club of ancient members of the child’s parliament thought about the teachers who left their great footprints on their personalities and character development. They seized that opportunity to thank their teachers for being their character builders,for impacting their behavior positively and pushing them to the shores of success and knowledge.
Another thing that all the participants enjoyed was that the students who attended this national initiative were all lowachievers. For the first time in Morocco, the whole community thinks about listening to the students who have problems in their studies.
Listening to their needs, their problems and the reasons why they do not work and study hard was so fruitful for both the organizers and the teachers. As a teacher, I found out that the problem is not always in students. Most of the time, we do not know the students we teach and we do not know about their learning styles and about what they like and dislike.
Teachers spend most of the school time teaching learners they do not know. It is not enough to know the names of the students and their faces. Teachers should schedule more time to fathom the learner’s psychology and character so as to know where to start teaching and where to put the full stop.
The teachers have cried while listening to their students talk about them. We always make students cry in front of us or in private, but we rarely see teachers crying in public. The farewell party in Bouznika was so warm and teachers didn’t control their hearts and eyes. Tears were seen falling from teachers’ eyes while saying goodbye to their students and to each other.
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