The teacher that teenagers want

“In the main, people say the teenager doesn’t want to know. He or she’s lazy, uncouth, doesn’t work and just wants to spend the school year making no efforts at all, glued to a cellphone and wearing designer clothing…And these “teenagers” apparently want a teacher that demands nothing from them”.

It’s a deep-rooted stereotype and, to be honest, we only ever hear of teenagers when there’s been some sort of trouble, or unusual incident.

Maria Gabriela de Sousa Silva, a researcher for CIES, the “Centro de Investigação e Estudos de Sociologia”, of the ISCTE-IUL, has another way of looking at today’s youth.

She’s decided to share it in a collection that now involves four books. The collection comes from her academic investigations and her own personal experiences.

“I stopped having intervals in my classes many years ago as I almost always end up talking with my pupils, and during these conversations, many important aspects of life and teenage concerns come up”, she said.

Her latest book is “one that has to do with the vision of the teacher that adolescents want at school”, and which dispenses with the cliché that teenagers are lazy and have no interest in learning.

“In the majority of cases I find many teenagers who want to see a really good teacher. A teacher who knows – who is competent. Beyond this, they want a teacher who understands them. Who knows how to listen. Who doesn’t underestimate them. In the end, they don’t want a teacher who is simply there to mark time”, she says.

The teacher-author came to this discovery via a number of interviews with pupils. Put succinctly, the ideal teacher “is a professional, competent – an educator. He or she is a person in which the pupils can see themselves. This kind of teacher is a point of reference for the rest of the pupils’ lives”.

But isn’t this – although perhaps a little idealised – the normal profile one would expect of a teacher?

In many courses designed to train people for the world of education, the teaching/ didactic aspects are often given less importance than other areas. It’s something that happens frequently these days “and needs urgent redress”, Maria Gabriela de Sousa Silva considers.

By the same token, it has to be remembered that there was a phase in the recent history of Portuguese society where “many people entered the world of teaching who could not have found a job anywhere else”.

For a long time “the world of teaching took in just about anybody – often people with a background wholly unsuited to what would be needed”.

And thus, people without any aptitude for pedagogic teaching entered the classrooms of the nation’s schools. “We still find cases like this today”, Silva tells.

The classics – to read, or not to read?

“One of my greatest battles continues to be the choice of appropriate literature for the various levels of education today”, the teacher from Faro who works at Lisbon’s “Escola Secundária D. Pedro V”, explains. Through around a thousand interviews made with pupils in different years in secondary schools, Maria Gabriella Silva has completed a unique doctorate in Portugal.

And, now it’s out in book form. The title, «Ler e Amar na Adolescência» (Reading and Loving in Adolescence), has a preface by Maria Lúcia Lepecki and Daniel Sampaio. It shows that the Portuguese classics that are obligatory literature here influence the (unstable, by nature) emotional balance of young people.

“What happens in most of these obligatory classics is that aspects of life are shown in their most negative forms. Love ends up being something terrible that happens to people – because the “loves” are thwarted, prohibited, lead to death, suicides and the break-up of families.

Thus, our adolescents are given very negative messages about something that is really the most wonderful thing that exists on earth!”

For example, the central theme of the 720-page classic «Os Maias», which Portuguese writer Eça de Queiroz published in 1888, is the incestuous love between two siblings. And this is one of the books that 11th year pupils are set to read at an age when they’re developing affections and “starting to experience their first passions”. What I suggest is that there should be a kind of “think-tank” in schools, involving people who understand adolescence and the teenage years, so that adequate literature can be chosen for that phase of development,” Silva recommends. Teachers, in the company of psychologists, pediatricians and sociologists would form these “think-tanks”.

Elsewhere, the researcher plans to discover what the smallest children have been reading since primary school. Does anyone know?

Social agitation

Another topic for discussion regarding teachers is whether they should be educators, in the broader sense, of manners. Maria Gabriela de Sousa Silva thinks they should.

“I always maintain that a teacher is not simply about teaching a given subject – he or she is also an “educator”. Schools cannot divorce themselves from this role.

These days, we have pupils who spend more time at school than at home. They come in early, and when classes finish, they prefer to stay at school with their friends rather than return to a home with nobody in it”.

“What worries we most is that today very few of them show any hint of what they’d like to “be” later on – and they don’t seem to know/ see how they can construct that future”.

“Inside their schoolbags more often than not you don’t find books – just broken dreams and family dramas”.

“They want to believe (in a bright future) but too early they see the difficulties in their own homes: unemployed parents, with problems paying mortgages, car hire-purchase installments, etc. They start to see life before it happens through the lives of their parents”.

And regarding the issue of sex education, Silva argues there shouldn’t be a polemic. “I respect other people’s ideas, but I think sexuality is a very mundane topic. Many teachers are inhibited by the issue and unprepared to talk about it – but in the various subjects we have: Portuguese, History, Physics, Chemistry and Maths, we could easily introduce the subject using examples and basic headings – and, of course, adapt the whole thing to modern life, using adequate language and respect for the pupils”.

Finally, Silva considers that “teachers have to be valued” in order to reduce the problems of discipline in schools, and in society in general. “These days, the teacher is seen as a lesser being. He or she is at school, following the orders of superiors – an educational programme, and not much more than that…”