Jottings on Teaching

Posted on a special demand by Anoop N

Today is the Teacher's Day here in Korea. Of course, the country has moved away from the rigid Confucian Doctrines like; "Do not even step on the shadows of your teachers".
Yet, the traces do remain here and there :)

Sometime back I received a request from a student of mine to post here, an article I had written for the college magazine. I told him that it's difficult since I kept no copy of the manuscript. Without much delay I received an e-mail from him;

A Small Gift for my Beloved Master

Respected Sir,

Kindly find the attached document. It is one in my collection which I cherish the most and that is why I have carried that even to Delhi. The attached article which You wrote for our college magazine in 2006 .... Yesterday I .. read Your article once more. ..... I have scanned a copy and thought that it will be better to mail that to You. Recently I had a real life experience to grasp what it costs to be a teacher. That I may share with You some day ......

On his request I am publishing the entire article here, with only minor proof corrections.

Jottings on Teaching

(This article is intended for my students who may wish to take up teaching as a profession, not for my eminent and enlightened colleagues.)

“Om, Sahanavavatu; Saha nau bhunaktu;

Saha viryam karavavahai;

Tejaswinavadhitamastu;

Ma vidvishavahai.

Om shantih, shantih, shantih.”

May He protect us both. May He nourish us both.

May we both work together with great energy.

May our study be thorough and fruitful.

May we never hate each other.

Om Peace! Peace! Peace!

This prayer is recited by the teacher and the disciple before proceeding to learn the wisdom of the Upanishads. It is a reflection on our ancient tradition in teacher-student relationship. The teacher and the disciple pray to the Almighty to enable them to work with devotion and mutual cooperation to understand and attain the knowledge contained in the texts. They seek His blessings in making the study fruitful and in preventing any sort of mutual hatred between the preceptor and the disciple. Finally the peace invocation is repeated thrice to ward off the three kinds of obstacles to learning; adhyatmika (bodily), adhibhautika (terrestrial) and adhidaivika (heavenly).

The prayer reminds us about the importance of team work involving the teacher and the student in the search for knowledge. Teaching is not merely face to face communication. It also involves 'looking outwards together, in the same direction', the teacher guiding the vision of the students, improving his own in the process.

Many youngsters are reluctant to take up teaching as a profession because of the lower monetary benefits involved. The wealth of a teacher is measured in terms of the richness, the variety and the intellectual range of his students. And the wealthiest is that teacher whom each one of his students has surpassed in professional and personal life.

“Genius and obedience are incompatible”, said Sigmund Freud. Some teachers do not allow their students to be stubborn and unruly and expect them to be obedient lambs. They try to implant a meek submissiveness and a weak will on their students. This will nip in the bud, their independent creativity and free thinking. Is that what we want for our future generations? A search for something new is motivated by a refusal to follow the existing pattern because the searcher is not satisfied with it. Dissatisfaction and disobedience are inherent features of individuals who searches for and creates something new, not only in science, engineering or technology but also in art, literature and philosophy.

The great Russian academician and Nobel prize winner Pyotor L Kapitza shot off a strongly worded letter to the supreme leader of the then Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev on the freedom to disobey. He wrote, among other things, the following;

“The basic stimulus for any creation is the discontent with the existing situation. An inventor is discontented with the existing processes and invents his own; a scientist is discontented with the existing theories and searches for more perfect ones. And deeply discontented individuals are restless people, who by the virtue of their characters, do not happen to be obedient lambs.” Khrushchev, who was onto curtailing academic freedom, got the message and backed off.

A good teacher should understand how it hurts a student’s pride if he/she receives undeserved disapproval and disapprobation for his/her ideas. On the contrary, if the student feels that the teacher notices his good qualities, he will try his best to live up to the standard expected of him and strives to do even better. Don’t you think that all young people have something good in them irrespective of their academic abilities? No teacher can instill goodness in the soul of a student if the youngster himself is not making the effort. And it can be triggered only in a friendly atmosphere, where approval comes before censure and the teacher sees what is good in every student. A teacher’s success, to a large extent, lies in inspiring these moral efforts in a young person. They must implant the feeling of self respect and pride in their students and be their comrades in overcoming their difficulties. They are duty bound to prepare their students to stand up for themselves in any trying situation.

The teachers should never discriminate between their students on the basis of caste, faith, political beliefs or even academic performance. But they should spot, recognize and improve upon the individual qualities and innate abilities of their disciples. Even brilliant young minds need proper guidance and motivation for realizing their full potential.

Great Mathematician, G. H. Hardy had mentioned that the most ‘romantic’ incident in his illustrious academic life was the discovery of a young genius from a distant land and helping him find his rightful place among the pantheon of greats. But for Prof. Hardy, Srinivas Ramanujan might have been lost to the world. In spite of his towering stature among the academicians and intellectuals of the day, Bertrand Russell had no qualms whatsoever in risking his own philosophical development and introducing a troubled and temperamental freshman, Ludwig Wittgenstein as having one of the most brilliant minds of his generation. Although he was already a well established and reputed coach, Ramakant Achrekar’s place in history changed colours when a little boy walked into his cricket clinic holding a bat almost as long as himself. Achrekar became a ‘Dronacharya’ as the little boy grew into the ‘Little Master’ under his tutelage. But I personally feel that it was highly inappropriate for our socialist republic to name its highest national award for coaches after a teacher who had destroyed the career of one of the greatest archers of our mythology by exploiting his almost fanatical devotion to his master. When a teacher shows such a bias on the basis of the so called nobility of birth, it betrays an intellectual inferiority on his part. It is unfortunate if such persons continue to enter the noble profession of teaching. They will be a major stumbling block in the progress of all mankind, holding back the thought process of the young generation by decades, or even centuries.

The points discussed may seem ‘utopian’ to some and are open for debate. Neither I claim to be a perfect practitioner of all that I preached, nor am I an advocate for the spare the rod crowd. The students must be properly reprimanded wherever the need arose. The biggest compliment I have received so far in my humble academic career was gifted by a poor boy hailing from a remote village whose answer sheets I had torn off for letting his friend copy from it during an examination. He later wrote in the student evaluation form that I was ‘God’s gift’ for him and his class mates!

Now, that was a huge ‘check mate’ for a strong headed teacher.

So, beware, aspiring young teachers......

Appearances can be deceptive. Your students can stun you......

....... with their moral superiority!!

Personal Note: Kindly excuse, if you felt the tone and tenor to be offensive. It was made during a difficult time at the institution, series of personal setbacks, casteist insults from colleagues and regular run-ins with superiors. And that makes it doubly pleasing, for the piece to have found its way back to me in this style. I consider myself extremely lucky, for having received the opportunity to spend a few hours between the blackboard and the students like Anoop.