Even the most impatient person on earth
will agree that patience is a virtue. I define patience as the ability to endure the
passage of time, coupled with the determination to face
all trials in the pursuit of a desirable end or goal. To put it
simply, it is our capacity to wait and endure. One will not be able to
appreciate this virtue if that person will not figure in a situation where his
or her patience will be put to an extreme test.
A prerequisite to become a good teacher is
the ability to be patient. We cannot expect students to cerebrally digest and
internalize a particular lesson five minutes after we have discussed such. We
have been students too so we should know this by heart. By far, the most
difficult lesson that my former students had to learn was symbolic logic,
particularly the formal proof of validity which requires mastery of inferential
and replacement rules. Such lesson was new to my students, akin to a new dish
that they have never seen before. Understanding each rule, and making use of
them in order to make a formal proof of validity took them two months to
comprehend. For a few, however, it just took them a few meetings to understand
it.
This lesson really tested my patience,
since it required me to explain each rule and how each is applied in
constructing a formal proof over and over again. This also entailed me to go
beyond our book and come up with my own sets of exercises that my students can
work on and solve every meeting. This lesson taught me and my students as well,
the value of patience and the idea that patience has its rewards in the end. So
like a ray of light at the end of a long and dark tunnel, majority of my
students finally understood the lesson much to our relief and delight.
A teacher trying very hard to teach a
lesson or skill to students is similar to a parent teaching a child how to make
baby steps. Such tasks are no different from each other, in terms of the vast amount
of patience that has to be exerted by the teacher or parent. As a teacher, I
learned that my students’ failure is my failure too, though not all the blame
should be attributed to teachers most especially if they already did all their
best. Teaching is a collaborative effort between the teacher and a student. If
the student will not make an effort despite the teacher’s motivation and
patience, then nothing can be done anymore.
To conclude, my profession as a teacher has taught me the value of patience, and that it is my duty to teach and guide my students, in the most patient manner. Patience is a virtue, and metaphysically, the longest road one can ever imagine.
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