In the process of sharing and communicating with students, I found several problems, and I would like to remind students and parents who have similar situations across the country, and at the same time, I would like to put forward some suggestions, hoping to help the development of these students through teachers and parents.
1. On the initiative to speak
First, the students' speeches were not active enough.
In the course of the lecture, I asked questions many times, but no one raised their hands to answer them, and no one took the initiative to answer.
I also tried switching to multiple-choice questions to get them to raise their hands based on the options I provided, but no one raised their hand.
I think it may be that the students used to receive less training in open speech, so they will be relatively shy.
This may in turn have something to do with the environment they are in and the context in which they grew up.
After all, this is a county-level middle school students, although this middle school has been rated as a first-class demonstration middle school in Sichuan Province with the unremitting efforts of the school leaders and teachers, and these students are still the top students in the school, but the students should not have enough social training and personal knowledge.
I have a lot of experience about this, I grew up in this county. Imagine, when I was in school in the county, if I encountered such a scene, a foreign teacher came to give a lecture, and in the face of the teacher's questions, I was relatively timid, and I would not dare to raise my hand to speak.
What's more, the teacher's questions are not the usual intellectual questions, but ideological questions, these questions, if you have no ideas, have not thought about it, it is really difficult to answer, and because you don't know the standard answers, you are afraid of answering incorrectly.
However, I still feel that even if you don't know the answer, you can still express your confusion, even if you say something casually.
Because, when I go to a middle school in another big city, I obviously feel that the children there are much more active in communication.
For example, I have given career planning lectures to high school students, junior high school students, and elementary school students in Beijing, and these students, even if they are first exposed to the word career planning, will respond positively when I ask questions, are very active, and are not afraid of making mistakes, and even junior high school students and elementary school students can scramble to speak without stage fright.
See: Talking about Education: Career Education Should Be Early - Why Is There Such a Difference in Planning for Junior High School Students? It's really the influence of the environment and whether or not you have enough exercise.
I said earlier that I would be more timid when I spoke, and I didn't dare to take the initiative to raise my hand, mainly because I experienced such a scene and got too few opportunities to exercise, and if I could face such opportunities often, I believe I could be proactive.
In fact, when I go to a lecture or a meeting now, if the speaker asks questions to encourage interaction, I am much more proactive than I was back then.
Because I have experienced a lot of meetings, lectures and social occasions, I have been trained by too many opportunities to speak, not only naturally eliminate the tension and worry of speaking for the first time, but also have a lot of experience and skills in speaking, know how to play on the spot, and be able to open my mouth to speak and think at the same time.
I know that it is unfair to compare the performance of students in county high schools with those in big cities, because the environment and opportunities between the two are too different.
However, I now point out this difference, not to distinguish between the superior and inferior, not to reflect the shortcomings of the children in the county middle school, but because I see this difference, I want to remind everyone to find a way to eliminate this difference and improve the ability and quality of each child.
Don't underestimate the performance of initiative or non-performance when speaking, this is actually a manifestation of social ability, and it will also affect a person's fate to a large extent.
Because, the opportunity to speak, can be said to be a kind of right to speak, when you can speak, dare to speak, you have the right to express yourself and show yourself, and at the same time, you can also exercise your ability in this area, which makes it easier for them to win certain opportunities, on the contrary, if you have been cautious, dare not express, the outside world can not hear your voice, you are easy to lose a lot of opportunities.
This will be evident in the student cadres in the university, where students who dare to speak and have strong expression skills are often easy to receive the attention of teachers and other students, so they will have more opportunities to become student leaders and get other activities and exercises.
The more they exercise, the stronger their comprehensive ability will be, and they will be able to integrate faster and develop faster than others in the workplace. If you look at the leading cadres and entrepreneurs of those ** organs, are many of them student cadres in school?
And in society, it is also those who can speak and talk, who will get more resources and more opportunities, in popular terms, that is, they are more "open-minded".
Even, there is a phenomenon that we have probably discovered, that is, there is a difference between urban children and rural children in terms of university performance and career development on the whole, and we can see that urban children just seem to have certain advantages, and their development speed will be faster, which has a lot to do with their speech awareness and social skills.
I didn't know these truths when I lived in the county town before, and it wasn't until I went to school and worked in a big city later that I gradually realized it through my years of life experience.
Therefore, I now encourage every child to form a sense of active speech, exercise their expression and social skills, which will really affect their fate, and even this impact on their future career development will have a greater impact on them than their grades.
I would like to remind everyone to pay attention to this, but also so that everyone can get more opportunities in the future and not bury themselves.
Of course, I'm not saying that you want to make everyone rhetorical and flashy, but that you have to be able to do it, and you must also be able to say and dare to say it, and if you can only do it and not say it, it will be a pity.
So, how can students take the initiative to speak in public?
I think that in addition to school teachers can consciously train and mobilize students to take the initiative to speak in the classroom, it is also up to parents to provide children with more speech and social exercises, so that children can become daring, able to speak, and able to speak, which is a lesson that must be made up for children.
I am also a parent now, and I am very relieved that my children are not as timid as I was when I was a teenager, but can speak generously in various situations.
It had a lot to do with the exercise she got at school, and it also benefited from me and her mom guiding her. We will often discuss issues with her and have equal dialogues, so that she can fully express her opinions, and also let her participate in many social activities, including gatherings with our friends and outings with her friends, we will take her to toast together at the party, let her take the initiative to make a toast with others, so that she will exercise her speaking ability, and let her not be afraid to speak in front of others.
Now, as a career planning teacher, I know that the ability to speak in public and interact with others is necessary for a person's future development, and I also regard this as a necessary content in education, so I hope that all teachers and parents can also intentionally cultivate their children's ability and quality.
In the previous article, I also mentioned a high school classmate who said that he delayed finding a girlfriend because he was shy to speak, which shows the impact of this incident on people, and everyone should learn from it.
2. Understanding of society and occupation
Second, students have a lack of understanding of society and careers.
In the course of the lecture, since everyone did not raise their hands to answer the questions, I took the initiative to invite a few students to communicate with me through random answers.
I talked to these students about their plans for the future, what kind of work they want to do, what major they plan to study, etc., and from their feedback, I found that everyone has very little understanding of society and career, and the information they get is relatively limited and one-sided, which will affect their current planning for their future design ideals, and will also affect their voluntary filling in after the college entrance examination.
Based on this image, I can understand why so many students followed the trend last year to fill in the majors recommended by some Internet celebrity teachers.
If they know too little about what they know, how can they make their own judgments and decisions?
Isn't that just a matter of seeing who is famous and has a large audience, and then taking what others say as a guideline and implementing it according to the rules?
However, this practice is really very problematic and has very serious hidden dangers, I have written an article about this phenomenon before, see:
How to determine the direction of the major? Don't wait for someone to recommend! Parents self-exposed: apply for the exam according to the professional recommendation of the online teacher, and the consequences are serious! The score of the law major has skyrocketed, but it may be even more difficult after getting in! What's wrong with following the trend to apply for the exam? I don't want to see so many people who still don't have their own direction and choice when they fill in this year's volunteer application, or they can only listen to the recommendations of online teachers and follow the trend to fill in certain majors.
So what to do? Children need to learn more about society and careers.
But how do they know?
At the end of my lecture, a classmate came to me and asked me a question, that is, how to learn about careers.
After learning about his current spare time and his home location, I can only advise him to use every possible way to learn about the outside world, such as through online research, reading celebrity stories, and communicating with relatives and friends who have returned from other places during the Spring Festival.
I know that this kind of approach can play a limited role for him now, but after all, it is better to do it than not to do it.
Indeed, most of the time in middle school students can only study in school, and they have to continue to study when they go home, how much time can they get in touch with the society and learn about careers? Especially these students are already in their third year of high school, and they have less than four months to take the college entrance examination.
In addition, children living in county towns and even rural areas have limited types of occupations in the local society, and they rarely have the opportunity to leave their hometowns to travel and study in other places, so they also lack the space to understand the conditions of occupation.
So, how can you help your child solve this problem?
At the school level, you can arrange some job shadowing activities, or invite professionals (which can be launched among parents first) to come to the school to give lectures to students, which can help students open their eyes and obtain some career information.
However, due to the different conditions and resources of each school, and the current secondary school is still mainly based on entrance examination education, the opportunities that can be provided to students in this regard are limited, so parents still need to be more proactive.
Parents can help their children learn about some careers that they may be interested in, bring them introductions to related occupations, and introduce some professionals to their children, so that they can conduct career interviews with them and help them understand careers more intuitively.
If possible, take your child to travel or study during the holidays, and in the process, your child can get in touch with people from different industries and gain some insight into their work, which can also enrich your child's career cognition.
And this kind of thing does not mean that you will wait until your child is in the third year of high school, and will take the college entrance examination and apply for volunteering, but the sooner you start, the better, otherwise it will be too late.
3. Reflections on the ideal of life
Third, students do not think enough about future planning and life ideals.
In the course of this lecture, I asked you about your life aspirations, or what you want to do in the future.
No one raised their hand to answer.
According to my analysis, on the one hand, it may be that the students lack the exercise of taking the initiative to speak, and there is a little stage fright, and on the other hand, it may be a more important reason, that is, everyone really does not think enough about such a problem, so they cannot clearly say their future ideals.
I also took two classmates to answer, but they did not give a clear description of what they would do in the future and their ideals in life.
Of course, I also understand this phenomenon, if a child has limited contact with society, and no one has asked him about life ideals, or even whether he has life ideals or not, then he probably has not thought about such a question, and thus lacks his own ideas.
However, this phenomenon needs to be changed, and it cannot be left unchecked, otherwise it will have a great impact on the development of children's lives.
See: Why should you plan your child's career direction and college goals in middle school? How do you set your goals for college? So, how can this phenomenon be changed?
From the school's point of view, if it is possible to open a life planning course or buy life planning related books and teaching equipment, it is naturally very good, and it is best to have a special life planning teacher.
Some middle schools, such as the Experimental High School Affiliated to Beijing Normal University, attach great importance to career planning, and have these conditions at the same time, and even have a special student planning laboratory and publish their own teaching materials.
In this way, students can open their horizons, learn the methods of career planning and self-exploration, and get one-on-one guidance from professional teachers, so that they may form their own life ideals and career planning plans.
However, most schools do not have this condition, especially many county middle schools and even township middle schools, which can allow teachers to receive training, and teachers can integrate into their own subject teaching after having a certain sense of career planning and ability, so as to provide appropriate guidance to students and also play a certain role in inspiring students.
Another possibility is to seek some public welfare organizations and social resources that do career education to participate in the career education of teachers and students in schools.
On the other hand, parents still need to take the initiative to invest in their children's career education.
In fact, parents should be their children's first career planners and take the initiative to provide their children with life planning education.
Even if it does not provide children with the material conditions to broaden their horizons and increase their knowledge, parents should guide their children to think about their own career planning and life ideals.
At the very least, if you ask such a question, it will always give your child more new thoughts than if you never asked such a question.
For example, I once looked back on my middle school days and regretted that no one talked to me about my future and ideals at that time, which made me lack the motivation to study, did not work hard enough, and did not know how to choose a better university and major.
As for how to guide children to think about the future and make plans, this is a long story, I briefly talked about the method in some articles on WeChat *** for your reference:
Why do parents need parents to help them plan their children's career direction and professional choice?
How can parents help their children determine their future career direction?
How can you help your child find their way forward? Try my "Three Questions for Life Planning"!
Of course, in view of the problems I found this time, I feel that the students of the county middle school especially need to get career education, which will greatly change their fate, and they also need to change their fate!
Therefore, I will also strive to carry out more life planning education for parents and students in county middle schools in the future, hoping to help everyone!
At the same time, I hope that more people in the same way will participate in this cause and help those children who especially need to change their fate!
Let's do it together!