Aisyah Ahmad Shafi

Teaching is my passion, since primary school I found that it’s a pleasure sharing what I understand to my friends. When growing up, I believe that I have talent in teaching. I always become a part-timer tuition teacher when I have free time during study. Every time I teach kids, and feel eager to prepare the materials to ensure they understand what I’m teach them. I feeling very excited even though sometime I just had been assigned to teach the primary school subjects. It is a satisfaction when the parents said their kids improved a lot after tuition with me.

            From my experience, teachers’ styles of teaching have big influence to students understanding.  When teacher use many hands-on and exercises, the knowledge is lifetime than teacher just speaks in front of class. I believe that ideal classroom is utilising all parts of learning including visual, auditory and  kinestatics. Human are unique, everyone has their own talent and perception, therefore, I need to mix all the techniques to make everyone able to understand the knowledge.

            As a lecturer, I’m aware that I have big responsibilities. My responsibilities not only on transfer knowledge and produce graduates with brain but also with heart and values. Lecturer has big impact to students perspective of life. University’s life is the last checkpoint before they jump into the real world. In order to survive in the real world, they need to have soft skills including adab and akhlaq. Therefore, I believe that it’s my responsibility to show good example to them, advise them and seed good values inside them.

            As a muslim, I feel blessed becoming a lecturer because teaching has been stated as one of the method to get the continuous charity (sadaqah jariah). Based on hadith “When a man dies, his action discontinues from him except three things, namely, perpetual sadaqah (charity), or the knowledge by which benefit is acquired, or a pious child who prays for him.” (Sunan Abi Dawud). I believe that lecture time not only time to transfer knowledge to them, but also instil values and motivations to them to be graduates with akhlaq.

            Therefore, during my first semester of teaching I already try to instil values and motivation during the lecture, by sharing a verse of alquran or motivational quote. I share this quote before begin the lecture by putting that quote in the first slide of lecture and read it, but not explaining it. Thus, by taking less than one minute, I hope I can give impact to their life and perspective. Whenever they feel down or need motivation, they can refer the quote that I put in the slide.

            In conclusion, I hope I can be more creative in teaching therefore, my students able to understand my lecture easily and that knowledge can become life-long learning