Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Akhlaq to teachers
Teachers are persons who teach various kinds of knowledges to their students. In this case, we may distinguish between (common) teachers and educators. Teachers are persons who transfer knowledges, while educators are persons who implant certain patterns of behaviours. Success of a teacher is measured through his ability in transferring knowledges so that the students understand or master the knowledges taught Students’s knowledges mastery can be known through tests, and the levels can be measured in forms of marks 0-100 or achievement indexes 0-4.

Meanwhile, success of an educator can be seen from skills, disciplines, and consistencies performed by the students during the rest of their lives. Ethically, teachers and parents have equal positions. Parents have the virtue of raising their children, while teachers have the virtue of introducing knowledges and implanting patterns of behaviours enabling one to develop his self-concept in actualising himself to become a person favoured by himself, his family, and even his society. Two different persons can perform roles as a parent and as a teacher, but a same person can also perform the roles. It means that a father or mother may also be a teacher for his/her children, both teaching theoretical knowledges and teaching various practical aspects of life.

In silat (Indonesia’s traditional martial art), a suhu or teacher is very respected and obeyed technically and ethically. Obedience is a mental attitude, therefore his students do not automatically obey a teacher, and he should firstly prove his superiority to them.

In education, one can suddenly become a teacher of a discipline, but he or she can’t suddenly become an educator. Based on my own experience as a teacher in elementary school, senior and junior high schools, my first 10 years as a teacher didn’t make me an educator. Only since the 13th year, I thought that I was also an educator, not merely a teacher. A teacher’s focus of attention is transferring knowledge in the classroom, and the criteria of how to do it has been determined in teaching methodology. A teacher may feel that his tasks are only performed in the classroom and things happen outside of the classroom have nothing to do with his tasks. Therefore, a teacher may merely be feeling annoyed in facing problems regarding his students, but is not feeling concerned about them, let alone trying to overcome them.
In connection with his students, a teacher may more focus on himself as an officer-in-charge than on his students as persons that are being educated. Meanwhile, an educator focuses on his students being educated as a unity of human individuals. An educator will feel sad if he finds out that his students’ achievements decline and he will attempt to find out the roots of the problem, apart from the fact the problem is in the classroom or outside of it. A teacher may be easily not attending the classroom only because he is feeling unhealthy, but an educator will attempt to attend the classroom despite his unhealthiness.

Since the 13th year as a teacher, I felt that I was also an educator after having two following experiences:

First, associating with a principal who was very dedicating to education. The principal actually had a high social status, but he paid a lot of attention to his educational tasks. He always visited sick students and teachers and attended every social event such as weddings held by the parents of the students. At first, I thought activities like those were bothering me, but later I also comprehended the meaning of educational tasks comprehensively.

Second, having certain tasks as a teacher of Guiding and Counselling or Educational Counselling. As a counselling teacher, I eventually knew real problems of students as human children. Once I noticed a student who was actually smart and religious but he sometimes showed strange behaviours. After approaching him, later I knew that he had been experiencing a kind of identity crisis. He doubted his identity that time after knowing from his Biology teacher that considering his blood category, it is impossible that his biological parents were persons so far known as his mother and father. He became more confused after getting information from the hospital in which he had been born that in the year in which he had been born there was an incidental case of unintentional babies’ exchange. This identity crisis seriously impacted on his interpersonal relations with his family, his study achievements, and his integrity. Other case I faced was about a female student who was at the third grade of Senior High School. She was very aggressive to men, including me. I often felt shocked and awkward because of her slightly sexual aggressiveness. After approaching her, I found out that her father died when he was two years and from that time her mother became a widow.

The girl seemed to grow up in a very pitiful family. Because her home was so small and narrow, he often caught her mother having intercourse with men she didn’t know about. The young girl was contaminated by improper views, but no one offered her solution. She often read Al Quran and carried out salats and her study achievements were not bad, but her subconscious mind often made her doing aggressive behaviours, including to her male teachers including me.

As a counselling teacher, I didn’t only interact with students but also with the parents of the students having problems, so that I often faced a lot of “humane” problems concerning students, their parents (people) and fellow teachers. As an ordinary man, I often experienced inner conflicts in handling counselling cases, but as an educator and a teacher, my concern was more dominant. I was familiar with the students’ problems, so familiar that a kind “love bias” sometimes happened between a teacher’s love and a man’s love.

Experiences in facing problems of my students (and people) caused me to feel a kind of happiness and loveliness as a teacher when I succeeded in helping others and when I received sincere respects from my students. As an educator, I was feeling challenged by problems faced by students (and their parents) like the excitement felt by a fighter finding an equal fighting opponent. Sometimes I felt touched finding out that although some of my students had not met me again for more than 20 years but they still mentioned my name as their teacher when giving advices to their children or students In Islamic tradition, akhlaq of a student to his teachers is manifested in various forms, for example regularly visiting them, prioritising them in giving charity (shadaqa) or material infaq, giving his children name after his teachers’ names, asking for their advices and prayers every time he has strategic plans or purposes, sending al Fatihah to them, and inserting the teachers’ names into the list of person to be prayed after doing salat or in certain events.