The Joy of Being a Teacher

THE JOY OF BEING A TEACHER

I know, many of my friends in the fraternity, could raise their eyebrows and may call me up and say “Sir, Please come and manage my classroom!”. I understand the challenges of being a teacher today wherein he or she is expected to be a multi-faceted personality. Nevertheless, Teaching is a great joy.. One has to experience it!

The challenge of navigating through a number of intellectual dialogues blended with curiosity, inquisitiveness, doubt, suspicion, desire and ignorance is indeed a minute to minute living experience..

Whether you are teaching a kindergarten class or secondary school does not matter.. the situations may change.. the magnitude and dimensions of the challenges may change.. but the underlying spirits remain the same..

When you play a carom game with your child as a parent, sometimes you willingly lose the game in order to make your child feel the success.. And so is a classroom when a teacher may play ignorant to make a child beam with a sense of achievement, success and pride.. There is a great joy in losing.. Willingly!!

A passionate teacher is always empathetic with the learners.. She understands him or her.. Reaches out to sort out the issues.. handholds when called for.. and finally lets the student walk away with success; she stands back and when the child is awarded or rewarded, she sits quietly in the auditorium putting her hands together to celebrate an invisible success of invincible learner!

I have seen teachers who in the late hours at home, sitting on the dining table sport a stressful face saying “ I am worried, how I am going to sort out this problem tomorrow in the class” Least realizing the dinner is getting cold! Great teachers indeed.. They live for the purpose..

As I was getting down from an aircraft, nearly ten years before, the pilot who was standing outside the cabin, suddenly looked at me and accosted “Mr. G.B?” . I turned and he said “Sir, Do you recognize me? I am....” I watched him for a minute and said.. 

“I think your full name is.......... Have you shortened your name?”

“My God! How did you remember my full name after thirty years? “

“I said.. Do you remember you were not doing well in chemistry.. but were good in physics..”

We laughed whole heartedly.. the joy of being a teacher!!

In seventies, when I was the principal of a school at Chennai, I was entering the school sometime around noon when I saw an old man in eighties sitting outside my office who was suffering from Parkinson’s disease.  After a few minutes of discussion, I realized that he was the teacher on whose lap I sat down to write the first alphabets during the initiation of my studies.. I moved out..With tears in my eyes.. touched his feet.. it was the joy of a student meeting a teacher forty years later..

I knew his joy knew no bounds..

Teachers are not just harbingers of information from the books to the classrooms.. they are designers of the destiny of a learner... there is a lot of joy in this passionate design and it is indeed a joyful experience..