Memoirs of a Teacher

The last tour from Sawan

The examiner was visibly offended by my answer. That was in 1988. I was completing my B.Ed. course and the viva voce exam was going on. The question put by the examiner was: “How useful has the B.Ed. course been to you as a teacher?” My answer was: “A year of actual experience in the classroom is far more useful than this course.”

I had had a year and a half’s experience at St Joseph’s school in Shillong before that school deputed me for the B.Ed. course on a contract. So I was speaking from real life experience. Nothing teaches you a job better than the work experience itself. True, some theoretical knowledge does help and stuff like Bloom’s Taxonomy still comes in handy years after my B.Ed. course brought it to me. But no one learns acting from the National School of Drama any more than one learns to teach from a B.Ed. college. The Taj Mahal was not built by a university-trained architect.

Frankly speaking, most of my B.Ed. teachers were utterly uninspiring. For that matter, I have found most people who come claiming to be experts are quite insipid. I happened to be present at a training programme for teachers a couple of weeks back. The expert, who was the principal of a school, turned out to be so vapid that more than half the attending teachers left the programme midway. Subject expertise alone does not make a good teacher.

Teaching is an art. Like the actor honing his skills at the School of Drama, a teacher can learn many skills from academic courses and programmes. I picked up the skills required for effective teaching from the classrooms of St Joseph’s school where I was a learner along with my students. That is the first quality a teacher should possess: be a learner. When you teach any topic, look at it as if you are the dumbest student of your class. How would you, the dimwit of the class, want this topic to be presented? That was my secret. If I taught factorisation, I started with factors.

That worked well too. But I failed to learn a great lesson at St Joseph’s. The most important lesson for any teacher is that he/should touch the heart of every student if he/she is to be really effective. I didn’t do that at St Joseph’s. I was too young to learn that, maybe. I learnt this lesson when I started working at Sawan Public School, Delhi, which was an exclusively residential school for boys. Around 500 boys stayed in 5 hostels. The teachers as well as all non-teaching staff including a resident doctor and nurse and cooks and waiters and gardeners stayed on the campus. It was an enormous family. The heart matters more than anything else in such an ambience. Sawan is the place where I perfected my teaching skills as best as I could. That is where I understood the real meaning of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s words: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

When Sawan was shut down by the greed and malice of a godman, I was heartbroken. I went into severe depression which kept me out of public domain altogether for over half a year. I quit blogging too. The students of Carmel Public School near my village sustained me in that painful period.

Students have been my best sustenance. That has to come to an end too. This is probably the last year of my career as a teacher. After 37 years of teaching, I look back with satisfaction. My life wasn’t as futile as a godman and his women in Delhi and some Catholic missionaries in Shillong tried to make it out to be. Ironically, that godman, his women and those missionaries were all teachers. The fundamental difference between them and me is: they wanted to mould others in their own images while I have only helped my students to mould themselves. They play the role of gods in others’ lives and I play the role of a good friend in my students’ lives.

It was not an easy journey, however, from a moulder of destinies to an abiding friend. I learnt that the difficult way. By making mistakes, committing blunders, learning through experiences. In that process, it is possible that many were hurt. Let me extend an unconditional apology to any student whose progress towards self-fulfilment was impeded because of my personal drawbacks. Let me thank the hundreds who still remember me and extend greetings on this day.