Recently, my institution gives me a new duty as an instructor in intensive class. This class is designed to deepen some lesson i.e. English, Arabic and Math. It is not compulsory class. The participant of this program is students who have high motivation in learning those subjects. Here, I’ve a charge of teaching the students from social class. There are 19 students consist of 16 girls and 3 boys. Actually there are more than 100 students in social class but I’m out of my mind why the students are not interested in joining the class. To let you know that it is free for them to participate in this class without any money to spend. To answer the phenomenon, I’ve some assumptions to the problem why the students have low motivation in joining the class.
First, the intensive class is carried out in the afternoon. It is started on 2 pm after the main term finish. So the students feel exhausted in studying. If they join the class means that they have to sit in the class studying from 7 am up to 3.30 pm.
Second, they really have low motivation in studying. What I mean is they are not interested the three subjects offered. So they do not take it. They would rather go home and relax themselves than study in the class.
Third, some students have their own schedule in studying. They can not arrange their time because they have joined course or in house training.
Fourth, the committee of the program does not tell the students about the advantages of the intensive class and they also do not set the main goal of the program. So the students think that the program is the same with the regular class.
Based on the assumptions above, the instructor has a hard job to convince the students joining the program that they will get something new that they won’t find in the regular class. Beside that, the instructor should modify the teaching learning process so that the student will feel cozy. It can be applied by many techniques such as finding the interesting material presented in the class, managing the classroom as comfort as possible for the students.
Making the situation of the class different is the way I have ever done to my students. The following pictures show when my class is studying in the garden. It happens when we feel hot studying in the classroom. I invite them to find the chilly place to study. We study under bamboo tree. Look… they enjoy the teaching learning process, don’t they???