"Oh, My Student Cried!"

I was teaching math to a group of second grade elementary students. At the beginning the class was so fun, I let my students; Bila, Shasa, and Liza, asked anything to me and let them sometimes talked each other. They seemed enjoy the class, even they didn’t really pay attention to the explanation I gave. I guessed it’s typically little children. I tried to accommodate what they needed in learning, they wanted to prove that they were able to do some exercise and answer questions. I gave them a chance to make their own note, and explained the material by themselves in front of the class.

In midterm of the class I gave them five numbers of exercises which were exactly the same with the material we had just discussed. They kept talking each other while doing the exercise. I didn’t really pay attention to the topic they were talking about, but I just suddenly knew that Liza cried because Shasa mocked her. Fortunately it’s not a big problem. And then I started paying more attention even to every single word they spook and to the way they did the exercises.
These are what I get:

1.For many times Shasa came to me and asked me the right answer of the exercise. I tried not to answer, I said that she had to think about the right answer by herself, even when she had a right answer. I sometimes give them the clue of the answers or how to answer the question.
2.Liza was a bit different from Shasa, she tried to do the exercises by herself, but she couldn’t answer the two numbers of the exercise in which I use exactly the same shape, but I rotated it, with the example I’d given before. She kept asking whether the pictures were the same.
3.As Shasa did, Bila also kept asking the right answer of very single number. I just gave the same response.

I meant to check their answers after they finished the exercise. I just wanted to measure that they had comprehended the material and gave them further explanation if it were needed. However, they preferred giving me their answers and talking each other while waiting I checked their answer to asking question about anything they didn’t understand. They asked me to grade their exercise. They told me that they just wanted to have a grade and didn’t want to talk about the material anymore. I check their answers one by one, Shasa and Liza got a perfect grade, 100, but I was not sure they had mastered the material. On the other hand Bila just got 40. I didn’t angry to her, I even didn’t cross her wrong answer, I prefer explaining the material once again to her and helped her to write the right answers. However, Bila didn’t want me to explain anything, she suddenly cried. I tried to comfort her, I said this is just an exercise and I didn’t mean anything when she got 40 or 100 the most important was that she understood the material better. Shasa told me that Bila’s mother would be angry to Bila if she got a bad score, she would consider her daughter as a stupid student. I knew it would not work to force her learn the material at that moment. I stopped talking about the material, and gave her three more exercises to Bila. I asked her to do the exercise, I helped her to answer every single question so she got 100.

I found that my students are typically Asian students, furthermore they are Javanese. The main point I got from them that afternoon that they had a high value of correctness, just like Kumaravadivelu wrote in his essay about Promblematizing Cultural Stereotypes in TESOL, that lead them to appreciate the achievement rather than process. I assumed that knowledge for them is just something to be achieved, not to be applied, that’s why they preferred to get a good score to applying the knowledge. Take for example when we discussed math about angle, they were not interested to the example I gave. I gave them any kind of angles that they might find in their daily life, but they asked me just to draw lines on the board and made them into an angle, just like in the book.

Furthermore their parents tend to make them think that a good grade means a good student. As I explained before that Bila cried because she didn’t get a good grade and how Shasa and Liza kept asking for the right answer. They didn’t really care about how to solve the problem, they just though how to get y even couldn’t recognize the same shape when I rotated it. the right answer. It lead them to not have a critical thinking, they are so bookish. The

I’m trying to make my students to be creative and learn everything my themselves, but it’s so hard. They have already curved to be like that. :'(

*de