She has
recently become a teacher of English at Moscow school 985. In
the article she shares her opinion about solving national
problems in her class.
Nowadays tolerance in general
sense is a very actual and controversial topic today. Not only
in Russian federation this problem is widely spoken about.
Xenophobic mood that is so popular in contemporary society today
is not typical for a concrete country. It is a tendency in the
whole world. In Europe it appears constantly and in the USA the
situation is saved only due to the political correctness. To
start solving the problem it is wise to start from our
educational sphere from schools where the roots of the tolerance
take place where children are taught to be tolerant.
Sincerely
speaking schools and teachers should pay attention not only to
the global aspect to this problem. We live in Russia and the
contemporary situation of patience and tolerance leaves much to
be desired. It is not only a problem of national tolerance that
Teacher have to bred. During the meetings of parents teachers
constantly speak of the way to teach children to respect other
people, about the necessity of valuing people’s lives, that
peoples personality is the most important thing that people’s
rights are of greatest important, human self confidence.
Schools
since the very beginning must show every child that he is a
personality and every human around him is also a real deep
personality as well. So consequently when pupils leave school
they feel themselves the full-fledged citizen who understands
that personality must be more appreciated than any other things.
Naturally it would be strange to
hire a teacher of tolerance at school. It is obvious that it is
the teacher who really needs tolerance trainings. There are
programmes of tolerance and they are oriented on teacher
training .If the teacher is not patient to himself and his
pupils don’t respect himself.
His pupils
copy its thoughts and points of view. Among the great variety of
teacher training courses there are lections about tolerance.
Auto training is a branch of the training. It is socially
psychological programmes that last about 2 weeks. The main point
of them is to see the world with the other people’s eyes. They
are dedicated and were worked out by leading psychologists,
consequently when teacher is a personality it is obvious he can
pass it to the pupils.
When pupils
enter primary school they begin to be taught being tolerant but
unfortunately it is too late. Kindergarten is the place where we
should start working on this program as it’s the first time
children face the society. In the birthplace of teasing a fat or
a lop-eared fellow it’s the time for teachers to react. Some
years later great problems with national problems appear. The
teacher must always be attentive, must know children and know
how to influence them to know how to stop the humiliation of the
personality.
Unfortunately there is no universal recipe how to educate
tolerance. It must become the lifestyle of professional teachers.
But it is not only teachers who must teach being patient. It
comes from the family. What should a teacher do if he faces the
problem when the child comes to school with intolerance that is
copied from his parents some rude words towards other nations.
May be parents supposes the child will no hear them or they
simply don’t care. I know that there have been held some
investigations according the link between the level of
intelligence and tolerance. It showed that children motivated on
science and education are not involved into the national arguing
and quarrels. Teachers have to acquaint pupils with the ways of
behavior with other nationalities.
I would be
glad to share my own experience of working with children in
order to make them form one united team in spite of the fact
they come from different countries and they are different in
general sense.
I have a
class now it’s the ninth form, there are 15 pupils in my group.
There are pupils from Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Tatarstan,
Azerbadjan in my group. This class is multinational. When we
started working together 3 years ago I was impressed that
constantly they use impolite words addressed to each other and
this words usually contains humiliation mixed with anti-Semitic
words. All the children are kind and not aggressive. It seemed
to me that they simply don’t pay attention to the words they use
to offend each other and don’t really understand how offensive
it is.
I wanted to change the situation
I made up
my mind to try to change the situation and to fight with the
problem. First of all I made a plan where they must sit in class
and children of different nationalities were sitting separately
not to provoke conflicts. Then I draw a poster where there were
photos of all my classes and I wrote rules of behavior in my
classroom. They were: do not shout, don’t stand, and don’t say
offensive words. Don’t name the nationality, don’t be
aggressive, don’t fight, and don’t offend.
And as psychologists say that if
we forbid something we should also permit something so that the
pupils would not feel themselves in a cage. So I also made a
list of things they are allowed to do: answer the teacher's
questions, do homework, be in time, enjoy the lesson, have fun,
relax, be polite and kind. So if any of these items was broken I
asked the pupil to stay after the lesson for the discussion and
he got more homework. Some time later I noticed that there are
fewer and fewer children who left after lessons .Then I realized
that it’s time to create some command activity I mean to do
something together to become closer to each other to spend time
together.
First we went to the cinema and
I realized that there are no problems for the children to
communicate without offensive words and they easily get on well
and find themes for the conversation. We also made a theatrical
play together moreover it was made by the children themselves.
We watched the film put down the plot and the dialogues and then
made scenery. We worked together and aggression as severe as I
was has gone. Naturally when people see each other 7 hours a day
when they are different as personalities it is not always easy
to be polite and kind and not to be annoying. But the goal of my
work with this class was to reduce the race quarrels and to
show that all the people are personalities and they worth being
respected and tolerance is more fashionable than to repeat rude
and resist words and phrases they hear in the street or in a
film or in magazines and books.
So to sum it up I can mention
that naturally teachers are not gods and we are not capable of
changing the world but in the very start of my work as a teacher
I faced the problem or children’s ignorance about the necessity
of being tolerant. I suspect to solve the problem teachers
should show the other side of people of different nationalities
I mean to explain that the human must not be judged according to
the nationality as we can be kind moral sensitive helpful
understanding friendly tender and with a deep inner world that
is more important than the color of the skin and the place we
were born in…
