Personally, I feel that there is a time to play and there is a time to work but I would not always be motivated to work when I’m down. Students do know how to study by themselves, however, they most need to get motivated and get into the mood. I’m guilty of such a mentality myself before. It wasn’t until I rediscover my childhood by watching ‘Mary Poppins’ that I remember to put the ‘play and fun in the work’ (a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine goes down). I find this the best analogy because studying is like medicine, it tastes awful but it makes you better; studying is tedious at first but u will be cured of ignorance and you will feel very satisfied after you have completed it. Studying is always seen as a serious task, hence, to the younger students (this I include secondary students), gets turned off when they hear the word ‘studying’. The worst case scenario would be forcing the students to go for constant remedial lessons when they are already tired and the remedial lessons are just the same as normal class lessons. Instead getting the results from them, we will end up getting poorer results from them as they have lost their motivation to study. Hence we must put the fun into studying if not the students will lose interest in learning altogether.
In my opinion, making the students sing nursery rhymes in class is part of fun. I loved it as a child, so do my friends. In Secondary school or even in Junior College, I was lucky to have some teachers who would try to make lessons fun and they would be my inspiration for this discussion. During geography, occasionally my teachers would show us breath-taking documentary films. My classmates and I have agreed that we tend to remember what is said in the documentary, even if we watched it once. During literature, my teachers would instead a bit of interesting facts here and there. My lit teachers in JC often make us act out the drama text in modern local context to help us get a better picture of the situation in the text. Also, allowing the students to joke around a bit in class would keep the students interested and awake! My math teacher in sec 2 knows how we hate math and so she will come up with jokes related to math or the likes to liven p the atmosphere and keep us awake in class. Though I must admit that some jokes would be a bit lewd, if it is related to the subject in question, why not? Even if the jokes gets out of hand, that’s when the teacher comes in to guide the situation back on track or even advise them on the consequences of say such out-of-hand jokes; after all mistakes must be made for the lesson to be learnt. So after all this real-life examples, who say we can’t put the fun in learning. After all, the directors of Mary Poppins would not be singing that song if it wasn’t true.
