Show where you come from

Today I want to talk about some thought I have been collecting recently about how to teach and how to connect with your students. Lately I have been reading that the motivation is the key point of almost everything related with the professional career and, of course, with the education.
The problem what we can do if our students are not motivated enough to follow the lesson. Here the connection with your students are the main thing to be focused on, how to connect and therefore, how to transmit our own motivation.

Each student is different, that is an obvious fact, but everyone has a strong point, a hobby or something that can help us to support and ,later on, to build up our interaction with the student. How to find it, or which methods you should employ to reach that goal, it´s up to each teacher. I will never say this is an easy task, that is why this should be considered as part of our daily job, call it a challenge if you want, but if you ever are able to connect with your student and create some kind of relation beyond the established one (teacher / student relation) and you turn into not the enemy, just the opposite, someone he can trust,  someone, who will help him to overcome the hurdles in the middle of the path in order to reach the final goal.

A teacher should be a guide who has to lead the student, show him the way, accompany him from the first moment till he stays out of our reach. That is our responsability, that is our job at the end of the day. What I meant to say is that teaching is more that knowledge although we are focused just on the results and how to achieve them. I think this should become a part of a past, we must remember and learn from it. This line of thought is something that we neglect by repeating it.

If you always repeat the same pattern, you will learn nothing out of it, so at the end, the method won´t evolve the way it should. What I want to express in this post is that it is possible to assist our students by showing them the path we had walked down before. Years ago we have been students too, there is no way it can be denied, so why should these paths remain hidden ?

Maybe if you show your previous experiences as student proving them that you are not the enemy, just a successful student, who sat on the same chairs on which your students are sitting at that moment, you can become one of the group, not as a teacher but as a big brother or in the best case scenario, a role model. That way a model can be set and the teacher might be able to connect with the people in front of him without losing a bit of authority and improving cohesion of the group at the same time.