SHAH ALAM - In the heart of every dedicated teacher lies a deep-rooted passion for nurturing young minds and shaping the future.
Iqbal Ahyar, with over a decade of teaching experience, embodied this passion and strived to instill love for learning in all of his students.
With a keen focus on making education accessible and engaging, Iqbal utilised innovative tools like drawing and animation to humanise complex subjects for his students to better understand his lessons as well as sparking curiosity among them.
"This way, it is easier for them to digest," he said.
He said he used the Procreate application to simplify lessons through drawing for the Science subject for Form 3 and Form 5 and Biology for Form 4 and Form 5.
Iqbal who is a Tiktoker and tutor at a tuition centre said he never wanted to change his profession as he believed that he was the bridge that connected students to knowledge.
"That is my motivation to keep going to the point that I feel obliged to share knowledge with my students," he said.
He said he would also make sure that everytime he teaches, his students did not face any kinds of mental block such as thinking that the subject was difficult at the beginning of his lessons and would always try to make his lessons easier so that his students could understand better.
He also emphasised the importance of not stigmatising students who were left behind by considering them as "A students" as well.
This way, he said students would feel valued and believe they were capable of learning difficult subjects like Science and Biology.
"One thing about teachers is that they would stay up late to provide materials and make sure that their students are learning well, even through tough love.
"I once experienced it (tough love from a teacher) when I studied Additional Mathematics.
"I used to score just 11 out of 100 for the subject, but thanks to my teacher who kept on pushing me to try harder, I felt compelled to keep learning and eventually, I got an A," he said.
He said he would do the same to his students, where an academic achievement should be attributed to self effort too and initiative of wanting to learn.
"After SPM (Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia), students come back to me to say thank you and then I would tell them that it is their effort, not mine alone.
"The only thing that teachers want to see is their students receiving the lesson well," he said.
Iqbal who is also a social media influencer said he viewed social media like a food buffet where were choices which were healthy and some were not in the long term.
"I treat social media as a food buffet, where there would be food when consumed you would be unhealthy in the long term.
"Educational content would be the vegetable of the buffet, where it is essential for the young generation to consume where the activity of scrolling on social media is already a hobby to many.
"God gave me the ability to simplify (lessons) and draw, so I cannot waste that advantage. I urge other teachers to do the same, and in fact, I am thankful for teachers on social media, who are incorporating this element, which is educational on social media.
"Maybe it takes one hour to bump into educational content on social media today, but in the future, I would like to see that in just 20 minutes or so, you can see teachers teaching on TikTok.
"The important thing is for teachers to keep trying and just do it, without waiting for their videos to be perfect," Iqbal said.
Focusing on creating Malaysian content for Malaysian students, he hoped to fill the gap for those who were not fans of English content by providing materials tailored to their needs.