SOLITARY MUSINGS OF TEACHER

A Story by JENY

An attempt to evaluate Indian class rooms..... An attempt to weigh ideals against present situations

SOLITARY MUSINGS OF A TEACHER

I knew from the early years of my life that it is difficult to become ones’ own ideal self. But my worship for ideals remained fresh and alive throughout my life. Ideals fascinated me when most people ran after concrete predictable ways of thinking and acting.

Never-ending attempt to hold on to ones’ own ideals alienates one from his contemporaries. Mass is after trends and fashions. But trends and fashions feed to shallow, immediate excitements of well fed men, while they are impervious to lofty intangible ideals that mold his life. So those who strive for the actualization of an ideal, be ready to be lonely.

Uncertainty regarding the efficacy of an ideal is analogous to the uncertainty that pervades the life as a whole. For an n ordinary mind, functioning largely in a world of concrete happenings, it is difficult to assimilate an ideal thanks to abstract nature of ideals. Such minds in today’s world of fast foods get impatient with uncertainties.

Teaching is profession where professional ethics is very subjectively defined. Those ethics tries to define an ideal teacher and gives the teacher a source of reference.

Monitoring and evaluating the work of a teacher is not always possible in its full sense. In an Indian class room, relationship between teacher and student seldom takes a form that ethics demands. Events of classrooms are shaped mainly by whims and commercial attitudes of teachers. But there is no means of evaluation or detection subtle aberration in the class room teaching. And it is in this space, I mean in space of relationship between student and teacher where weeds of antisocial elements thrives. Because, in her relationship with pupil teacher suppresses her role as a molder of character.

“Teachers are molders of good citizens” become an ideal foreign to teachers themselves.. It is an ideal that will never suit to today’s classroom_ they say. So they rewrite it as “Teachers are reapers of top grade holders”. They are the saviors of their institution which feed them. They commit themselves for the success of their institutions. And what is the criterion that determines the success of their institution in the society? 100% result. A cycle of aberrations which commence from class room flows through whole institution and pervades the whole society. The cycle being rotated in the clock wise and anti clock wise direction. A vicious cycle indeed