My third retirement as teacher

 

I’m retiring from teaching for the third time now. 28 Feb 2025 will be my last day at the present school from where I retired twice earlier. The first time was just a formality because when I completed the official age for retirement the school gave me a formal farewell and then shifted my name to another ledger in the account books. Nothing changed really other than the remuneration method.

My second retirement was at the end of the last academic session in March 2024 when I decided that I was growing too grotesque for the contemporary teenagers. My young students called it ‘generation gap.’ They assumed that I belonged to the library shelf of the musty volumes of Britannica Encyclopaedia while they belonged to YouTube. They didn’t know that I had a YouTube video in which my cat was an emergent hero. And that there were a few more serious videos too which didn’t get much traction because the youngsters for whom it was meant thought that I belonged to the generation which assumed that TikTok was a grandfather clock.

A couple of months after I opted for that voluntary retirement, my school called me back because the one who had taken up my post had to leave the job for personal reasons. I was asked to substitute him until another teacher could be found. And, unfortunately, my school couldn’t get another teacher. Who wants to join the profession of teaching now? And so I continued this far, too far.

Neither my students nor I enjoyed what was happening in the classrooms in spite of the fact that I’m still in love with teaching. The problem, I have realised, is that my style of teaching has become outdated. I’m an old fool for today’s youngsters. I still love intellectual discussions while they want video games in class. And they are 17-year-olds.

Probably they would love something like Warzone or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as a prelude to a lesson like The Address which is a story set during the World War II. War is an entertainment for the youngsters. War is a catastrophe for me. So we part ways. We have to.

By the way, I started this post with the title India’s new education policy and my third retirement as teacher and my intention was to focus on Modiji’s new education policy, NEP 2020. But I got derailed. Never mind, there’s time tomorrow. I’m with Blogchatter’s #WrtieAPageADay and so this will continue. I’d love to meet you here tomorrow too.