Teaching is considered one of the oldest and noblest professions in the world. All of us must have read the story by well known writer, the late Munshi Premchand where he narrates the instance of a teacher who travels with his neighbours on a pilgrimage and suddenly the neighbours and their families suffer from dehydration. The teacher has all along been sulking for struggling to make ends meet with his paltry salary. But during the crisis situation, one of the teacher’s former students helps all of them and elevates the status and prestige of the teacher. The story ends with the teacher realising the respect that he has earned as a teacher! However, teaching is becoming a nightmare for most people today as one has to meet with ambivalent demands and deal with copious amounts of stress.
Prejudices, biases and teachers….
Several years ago, I had Ms Girija Mahadevan who taught me Hindi in Class IV. She was our family friends as her husband and my father worked for the same organisation. But all of a sudden, one fine day, I realised that she was not cordial anymore and was extra strict with me in the class. I couldn’t relate to this change in her stance and promptly told my parents. My mother realised that the teacher was venting out her frustration on me because her husband had resigned from the job in a huff and she felt that none of his colleagues (including my dad) gave him any sane advice not to indulge in any capricious move. But, poor me, I became the victim! But my parents sympathised with her situation and we did not make much of an issue about her changed behaviour. Though she did seem to thaw later on, clearly she made her bitterness more explicit!
When my daughter was in Class III, one of her classmates demanded that she give him her exam pad. This boy Akilan was the son of a high school teacher in the same school. This teacher was friendly with my daughter’s class teacher. When the latter came to know that my daughter had refused to part with her pad, she punished her by making her sit on the floor. My daughter was shaken and stirred. I was indignant but was at a loss as to how deal with the situation. Thanks to my spouse … she handled the situation delicately…she called up the teacher and explained to her that my daughter was disturbed due to the unfair punishment meted out to her and was there a way we could help by buying Akilan a new pad?
I think this message was hard hitting and later on my daughter’s class teacher understood the subtleness of my wife’s message. I was also the ex-student of the same school, so it helped. This change was possible because, as you might have noticed, in both my case as well as my daughter’s, we both articulated this clearly to our parents. Therefore, engaging in a healthy dialogue with your children about important events in the school is a good strategy.
Teachers are no machines. They are also human beings. So, the human weaknesses do tend to surface sometimes. We all know how biased the teachers in “Tare Zameen Par” were.
Disciplining the Students
“Spare the rod and spoil the child” is a good old archaic saying that is totally irrelevant today. We have been reading enough instances of teachers engaged in barbaric ways of assaulting children and causing them injury. Now due to all the adverse publicity that these incidents have generated, even those who wish to discipline the child in humane ways find it an onerous task. Those teachers who are good at teaching and have a solid backing by the school management can afford to be strict disciplinarians. Strictness can be conveyed through actions and conversations. There is absolutely no need to go physical. Rather than spanking someone, making the kid write an imposition 100 times or making him stand on the bench look to be more viable options. In some schools, the parents who pay through their noses are so sensitive to such disciplinary actions that every act of the teacher is labelled as corporal punishment. This is sad because such an attitude of the parents limits the teachers’ freedom to act as good administrators. There have been instances when such quarrels end up in police stations.
Conscientiousness, adaptability and interpersonal skills
Ms Rajni was the class teacher of class IV. An excellent teacher, she was also a disciplinarian and did not tolerate any non sense. In one of the parent-teacher meetings, one of the parents of a boy called Kevin John gave a 10-minute lecture to Ms Rajni on how to treat children with love and affection. Ms Rajni had rebuked the boy verbally for not having done his home work on several occasions. To add insult to injury, she was not on the best terms with the headmistress. Unable to cope up with stress levels and unable to find a baby sitter for her infant child, Ms Rajni quit her job. Today, she is content being a home maker and takes tuitions from her home.
There are some teachers who are good administrators but not necessarily good teachers. Ms Mythili Ramanan is one such teacher who comperes for the school’s annual day activities, is a judge for the several inter-school essay competitions but in the classroom- she is a mediocre teacher. Today she has been elevated as the primary school headmistress thanks to the fantastic equation that she shared with the school management.
Ms Lakshmi Rajan who worked in a school with 9 am – 5 pm timings eventually quit her job when she was unable to handle the stress. In this case also, she did not have a good equation with the principal and felt victimised most of the time. Though a good teacher, she was given out-of-the-town assignments. With her husband travelling most of the time, there was no other option but to throw the towel.
Thus, whether it is the corporate world or academic world, good interpersonal skills are
a must for survival.
Discipline – a Complex Subject
Three Bollywood movies come to our mind when we talk on the subject of discipline. The first is the 1967 sleeper hit – “Boond Jo Ban Gayi Moti” directed by V Shantaram which featured Jeetendra in a sober role as a school master. The trials of the school master in disciplining errant students formed the crux of the story. The second movie is the 1975 bomb called – “Imtihaan” which featured Vinod Khanna trying to discipline a bunch of overgrown, unruly high school kids. The third movie is the 1987 release – “Hip Hip Hurray” that was a modest success and pitched Raj Kiran and Deepti Naval against a student (Nikhil, who switched to television before quitting films altogether and ventured into business) who is a bully and headstrong. Today, real life has imitated what was depicted in these movies. Some teachers are so paranoid about discipline issues that they chose to remain silent spectators.
The need of the hour is to work around this complex subject in which an expert panel comprising educationists, scholars, teachers, counsellors, parents – all come together to work towards an optimal solution that will benefit the future generation.
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