Of Teachers And Teaching

My husband often tells me that I should have been a teacher, that I should have taught Mathematics or English Literature or something. Well, he is mostly kidding about that.

I don't really think I could have done that. Because I don't have the kind of patience that it takes. I get bugged if someone asks me the same question twice.

I had a lecturer in college who once told us something very essential to teaching. She said that when she taught us, she needed to forget that she had a PhD in Group Theory and that she knew so much about it. She had to think like we were thinking. She had to think that she knew only as much as an undergraduate student, and talk at that level.

Another one of my lecturers said that teaching was great because you were always in the company of young people, so you always stayed young. You had all these people around you who helped you come up with new and fresh ideas.

The philosophy in our college was that there are no teachers and no students. There are Senior Members and Junior Members of College. Everybody learns something from everybody else. It is actually true, of course, that when you try to teach somebody something, you learn a little something yourself, as I have learnt during my random experiences tutoring my brother or my friends, and mentoring my juniors in the workplace. Different people have different approaches to the same thing. And the "teacher's" approach may not always be the best. It's just that, sometimes the teacher will accept this, sometimes they won't. I really respect the ones who do.

Teaching is not just a skill, it's an art and a science. It's an art that people develop gradually with time and experience, not through PhDs and BEds and NETs. It's a science that improves with experimentation.