Fresher Challenges

Being a good teacher is as tough as walking on a razor’s edge

Being a teacher is the easiest of things we can do as many would think. They say teaching is the first thing to opt for when one is still not decided about his / her career path. There is an easy access to teaching and one needs to have just a willingness to do it. Want it, and it is available in schools that you find in every other street in your own community. This is partly true, especially for those who teach just for the shake of teaching or make it a stepping stone to make a bigger leap into the career of their choice. It is, however, not as easy as it sounds if you want to adopt it as the profession of your life.

Being a good teacher is increasingly becoming tough. It is even tougher when it comes to teaching the modern day teenagers. There are new confrontations in classrooms every day and most of these confrontations concern not projects and assignments but behavioral anomalies. Most of the modern day students are adamant and aggressive. Ranging from upper primary to undergraduate level, students are intolerant of teacher’s authority. They don’t entertain it when their teacher tells them what to do, and what not? They take it as interference in their freedom to learn. They prefer to be left free to do whatever they choose to even during the lectures. Some don’t even value the presence of teachers in their class and continue to display their disrespectful attitude towards the teachers. They don’t show any respect that their teachers ethically deserve.  Instead, they misbehave with them. They view teachers merely as people who have been hired to assist them, and who live on the money paid by them. Anything, as simple as inquiring about assignments or chiding for disturbing the class, can trigger a verbal exchange between the teacher and the student. Consequently, the teacher has to suffer insult and humiliation

Impatience and disobedience are the most visible behavioral deviations in modern day students. They have lost the patience of listening to their teachers. Time and again, they get diverted and you should keep reminding them.  Even a forty or forty-five-minute lecture is too long for them to sit through. They begin to show the signs of disinterest shortly after the teacher has started the delivery and it is clearly visible in their body language. Their facial expressions and emotive reactions clearly reveal that they are not enjoying what you are delivering to them. One of the most common and immediate reactions to this is they start dozing off right through the lecture. Some others react by creating distractions such as using their cell phones under their desks, whispering to each other and passing cheats to communicate with one another.

Today’s students want shortcuts. They have no patience in listening to hour long lectures to derive a short conclusion at the end. They don’t want to read the voluminous textbooks to find answers to a couple of questions they are confused about. They want readymade solutions to everything without having to work hard. Unlike students in the past who went to schools and colleges to gain knowledge, students in modern days go there to pass their tests. Even students pursuing their graduation courses want exam capsules. They are worried more about their grades than the amount of knowledge and skills their courses are likely to offer them. Self-studies and research oriented readings are rare even among university students.   

Amidst these odds and difficulties, being an effective teacher is challenging. As the saying goes “An mediocre teacher tells, a good teacher displays and a successful teacher motivates”, it’s even tougher to become a motivator. With the advent of new pedagogical dimensions, teaching has now gained a new definition. If a teacher fails to keep pace with these changing contexts, he/she is likely to fail. Unlike in the past, only being academically sound does not attribute to being a good and successful teacher today. Teaching has gone beyond the text books in terms of both form and content. Syllabus and the text books are now only the means but not the ends. So, only teachers who can transcend this traditional boundary and teach their students the values of life are likely to get better appreciation, and this is easier said than done.

Modern day classrooms are not merely the groups of passive listeners. They are neither the groups of inquisitive knowledge mongers and creative enthusiasts. They appear to be more like a group of troublemakers who care more about their rights than their duties. Having to cope up with such aggressive and irresponsible mass of youths, teaching has been as tough as walking on a razor’s edge. A modern day teacher, therefore, has to play a number of roles at the same time. He/she is a teacher, friend, psychiatrist, counselor, actor, joker and most importantly a good human being, the last of which is sometimes the most difficult of all.

Durga Gautam

Buddhanagar, Kathmandu

To The Haters

It is generally said that what people can’t achieve, they secretly hate it. Some display this abhorrence in their behavior and activities. The same goes to some people’s irritation with English language. They not only hate English but also show their disrespect to those who use English language to communicate with others.

The trend is more common in academic field. In schools and colleges, English is often viewed as an unimportant subject. It is considered as a subject which students can pass easily without having to work hard in it. From the early days of school, students are advised to allocate more time to Mathematics, Science and other technical subjects. Some non-English teachers even tell students that studying, practicing, and revising English at home is a total wastage of time. This gradually demotivates students to learn English and they start taking it lightly. Some even start hating it secretly while many others, especially those who are seeking to build their career in science and technology, begin to question its usefulness.

In the first place, schools and colleges are responsible for this sort of discriminatory treatment of English and English teachers. Many academic institutions treat English teachers unequally. They don’t give the same respect and value to them as they do to mathematics and science teachers. English teachers in these academic institutions are discriminated in salary and incentives. They are not paid as much as science or Math teachers even though they are equally qualified and teach in the same level. English teachers can hardly bargain about time and facilities while the others are allowed to use these privileges.

Most of those who hate English are usually the ones who don’t have good English language bases themselves. They know they lack good communication skills in English.  They have bitter experiences to have missed many good opportunities because of their poor performance in English language ability tests. I know some friends who had to give up their dreams of pursuing their studies in foreign universities simply because they failed to get a good score in TOEFL or IELTS. Some appear in these tests repeatedly but give up finally as they can’t improve the score. So they don’t feel   comfortable when they find others using English without much difficulty. It makes them feel inferior and they show their deep rooted frustration with English by advocating on its uselessness.

In the contrary, people with good English always respect and value English language no matter what subject areas or profession they belong to. We can see a good number of non-English teachers who speak and write excellent English. They use English regularly and are eager to learn new things every day. We have heard about people who never attended any formal English courses in universities but are good writers of English now. People with no formal degrees in English are English language instructors. It is not necessary that you must have studied English or must be an English teacher or instructor to know English. English is not only a subject that people opt to take up. It is a language that everyone needs to learn in this globalized world. So, dear haters, you’d better improve your English and see how it can benefit you rather than hate it.

Durga Gautam

Buddhanagar, Kathmandu