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Lead, kindly light
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Your best teacher may have been someone who would turn ecstatic at a sparkling, new insight, writes KALA KRISHNAN RAMESHon Teacher’s Day
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PHOTO: ANAND SANKAR
Showing the way Teachers can conjure up and inspire students with a vision of knowledge as potent technology
My best teacher was not kind. He was not gentle, understanding or funny either. He turned work into a life and death matter – if it did not cut the mind with insight and informed craftsmanship, he stormed with disappointment, if it did, he was
unabashedly ecstatic. From him, I learnt that teaching and living are inextricably sutured together, that a teacher’s craft is a reluctant familiar, waiting to slip off at the least inattentiveness and also that teaching is an exciting, obsessive, dangerous occupation, which can completely take you over.
In the non-West, we divinise teachers and teaching into easy homogeneity, ignoring the elaborate and transformative rituals of the classroom; the West has a history of deliberating on these aspects. bell hooks’ notion that “the academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created,” comes from a context shaped by Freirean notions of education as liberation, and implies subtext of knowledge as power, vested to some degree in the teacher.We may not talk about these things here, but that doesn’t mean that no one knows, as my conversation with seven-year old Vaishnavi Jayan and her five-year old brother, Abhimanyu, showed me. Vaishnavi likes her teacher because she is not “strict”; strict teachers “beat” and that’s not good because “even if you beat, naughty children will be naughty, you should tell them and they will listen.” Such perspicacity made me ask if she wanted to be a teacher when she grew up; Vaishnavi considers, but her five-year old brother, Abhimanyu needs no consideration, “Say yes, say yes, then you can make children stand in the corner.”
Of course teachers punish; we dominate, are mean and partial too, withholding praise and reward, but we also - every semester in different classrooms with different students - get down on our hands and knees and recreate the myth of the classroom as a potential paradise, on blind wings, soaring into uncertain flight.
The teacher as guru, who is all the gods in one, requires that the guru be god-like and also that s/he be completely devoted to the student, as our gurus (the real ones, Lord Krishna being the supreme example) were! It also requires that the student be willing, empty, and with only one goal in life. Today’s complex, often virtual, contexts and frames of reference suggest that while it may not be impossible to find such a guru, it may be possible to do so only in special circumstances. Aditi Machado, a second-year Arts undergraduate student points out: “With educational resources increasing, the importance of teachers seem to be diminishing. Students are more critical of their teachers, more prone to rebellion. I see teachers as guides, not gurus; they don’t need to be omniscient or omnipotent.”
Teachers do have power, though. They have the power to see in larger frames, perhaps simply for having lived longer, seen more, done more, but also perhaps because every teacher worth the name is part visionary-prophet, part alchemist-creator and part mercenary-adventurer, who can conjure up and inspire students with a vision of knowledge as potent technology.
Sitara Menon, a second-year arts graduate student believes that teachers know they have this power, but only “some choose to use it... others don’t... It’s like politics; you get what you get with little choice, despite what you may believe.”
That’s what makes me dislike “Dead Poets Society”, that syrupy Robin Williams film in which he is an English teacher. After Williams has finished gushing, storming, parading and posturing his message, we see that we have travelled along with those young men he swept off their dragging literary feet into a tumultuous adventure of poetry, but have seen nothing of those not stirred to adventure. We see and know nothing of the boy, who in the first poetry composition class could only write “The cat sat on the mat” or others like him, unfailing inhabitants of all classrooms, thereby trashing the complexity of pedagogical choices that teachers constantly agonise over. Ironically, William’s message is “Carpe Diem” - Seize the Day!
Ramya Kandhasamy, an M.Sc Electronic Media student of Anna university, says that teaching methods may vary with the subject, but must reach the entire class, whether done in the classroom, or outside and must also ensure that the “perspectives and approaches come from the student”.
Teaching too roots out from life and teachers’ methods are crafted from the sap of its contexts and meanings; negotiating the treacherous terrain of the classroom requires they be armed not only with instinct and a good compass, but also the reflexivity to know when to re-chart the adventure.
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