Travails of a Teacher
20 years back I took up teaching out of sheer boredom and tiredness. I had had enough of the
grueling routine of going to Delhi University everyday for five monotonous
years after changing two overcrowded DTC buses. I wanted a break from
studies and had the additional pressure of earning a few bucks. In short , I
needed money, had no ambition and no better option in sight. Teaching sounded
easy and available. Admiration and love for the profession followed much later.
In retrospect, I wasn’t meant to be a teacher. I had the softest voice which
wasn’t audible even a meter away. I had this habit of speaking in monosyllables or
acknowledging people with a mere nod. At times, when I averaged ten sentences
and five smiles a day, I got facial muscle cramps. I was a diehard introvert, terribly
conscious of my shyness. And a bookworm at that.
My initial years jolted me out of my stupor. It wasn’t as easy as it appeared. An age
gap of six years between me and my students was almost a generation gap in
front of these hard to please teenagers. No amount of literature available on how
to understand kids helped. But I learnt my lessons from my experiences and
those of my senior colleagues. A grudging admiration for the amount of efforts put
in by our teachers to educate us dawned upon me, and so did the dignity of the
profession I was in. The transformation from a complacent individual to a teacher
was gradual and enlightening. Teaching assignments took me from one
school to another, from one city to another and seven years back, I joined The Scindia
School. My initial experience here was no different. The boys left no stone
unturned to convince me that I was unwelcome. There were other redeeming
features about Scindia though. I felt enamored of the Old World charm of Scindia, the idyllic surroundings and its glorious past.
Then there was this novelty of being in a boarding school. There were so many
things going on simultaneously, a lot had to be learnt and managed, the heady
excitement of freedom to indulge in your hobbies/interest, different methods and
resources of teaching at your disposal. I consider myself lucky enough to have had
Mr Tewari as Principal and Mr Tengshe as Vice Principal. Mr Tewari had this
benign presence - full of encouragement and sound advice. Mr Tengshe had a fair
sense of judgment and a keen intelligence an extremely balanced outlook, on almost everything.
Another advantage that the boarding school offers is that you are with the
students 24x7 and you get to know them for better or for worse. Scrape that
supposedly tough/cool exterior and you find impressionable kids trying to hide
their vulnerability under the guise of fake bravado and devil may care attitude. It
took me all of three years and enormous efforts to be accepted in the Scindian
fraternity, to know that I had arrived. If today, somebody were to ask me the
toughest profession in contemporary world, I would unhesitatingly say -that of
a teacher. It requires enormous patience to explain the same thing ten times with
a smile on your face, to be non .judgmental when you just want to give a
piece of your mind, to deliver your best in front of a non -appreciative audience
at times. A whole lot of preparation goes in providing a variety of learning
experiences to students of varied interests, holding the attention of irrepressible
teenagers for 45 minutes and preempting their unpredictable behavior. You master
the art of communication when you preach without sounding like a preacher. It offers more unpredictable challenges than you can visualise.Every year is different from the previous one.
I may not be the best teacher but I am a better human being because of it.
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