CONFESSIONS OF AN INTROVERT

I am a voracious reader and growing up, books were the only friends I had. Unfortunately books can 'talk' but you cannot make a conversation with them. The result was, I grew up lacking in communication skills. I averaged five sentences a day and smiling gave me cheek muscle cramps. These qualities were detrimental to my chosen career of teaching. Not that I did not peruse journals and articles on teenage Psychology, but the expertise on 'How to talk so that the kids listen' can be tough sometimes. Nevertheless I have mastered the art of reasoning out with the kids and believe me nothing scares them more than when I offer them a chair to logically explain the disadvantages of their attempted misdemeanor in not less than hundred words .

An 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. I am learning to let go and look at the world from their perspective and find humour in the kids’ behavior.

There can sometimes be communication misunderstandings and paradoxes. If I were to put it differently this phenomenon could be put bracketed under the category called 'transmission and distribution losses'’ that occur from the moment a word is uttered to when it is understood. Interestingly I discovered that more often than not the consequences of this miscommunication were very student friendly.

For example if you want to conduct an experiment in the Physics lab and you instruct the students to report to the lab these are the possibilities on how the message can be interpreted:

·         Some boys did not understand the message and this overwhelmed them so much that they slept in the class to overcome the trauma.

·         Some boys misunderstood the message and the poor chaps went to the Computer Lab instead.

·         Some made a detour to the washroom, drinking water and lab in that order.

·         Unfortunately a few were not in the class when the instructions were given.

·         One or two had set up a race on who could copy the 'snail's pace' better on the way to the Physics Lab.

On the other hand miracle happens when your message beckons them to the Computer Lab:

·         Everybody understands

·         Everybody reaches before time

·         There is 100% attendance in the class within two minutes.

·         The 'snail's pace' boys put Usain Bolt to shame by the speed with which they rush to the lab.

If you experience smiling kids around you, more than usual trying to touch your feet or trying to seek your company and advise or appreciating you for random reasons, which you never realised existed in you, don't start feeling smug about your popularity. There are chances that:

·         Exams are round the corner.

·         Parent Teacher Meeting is scheduled next week.

Another unanswered mystery which baffles all teachers is that when you begin to collect notebooks for correction. Why is it that only the children who had incomplete work have their notebooks stolen around the given date?

I am a Physics teacher and the subject can be pretty intimidating to a majority of the students. I lighten it up by my class activities and the Physics jokes that I crack. (I have a collection of Physics jokes on almost all the topics) So we try to find out if Fatehveer exerts more pressure standing on the teacher's table or lying on it. My joke on Pascal and Newton draws meaningful silences from an otherwise noisy class.I have to de-fragment the joke to elicit laughter from them. A few Class XI students try to sleep on my painstakingly prepared worksheets, forcing me to remark that at least Physics problems cannot be solved by 'sleeping on them’. The pun draws a collective sigh from the class. They have learnt to put up with my idiosyncrasies.

Teaching can be fun and a difficult task at the same time. The words teenager and patience are rarely uttered in one sentence. Adolescents are well-known for being irritable, impulsive, and craving instant gratification. It requires enormous patience to explain the same concept 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 40 minutes and preempting their unpredictable behavior. You master the art of communication when you preach without sounding like a preacher. I can make kids listen because I have learnt how to get their attention .