Touching Teaching

Children are the torchbearers of a gleaming tomorrow. They are the ones who symbolize the progress and advance that humankind will make from one generation to next. It is an established fact that three to six years in a child’s age span, comprise a very crucial stage, a stage wherein the child, adult and parent ego states are built and refurbished. Every station has a Shaurya Army Pre-School dedicated to the educational needs of army children in this specific age bracket. Being part of one such school as Principal, I see each child who comes to us, as a lump of wet clay. We model this clay, giving it shape and form by way of letters, numbers and thoughts, modeling not just a mute statue, but an entire character.

Though people are obsessive about grades and their offspring’s performance, they often view a nursery teacher’s job with a certain amount of controlled disdain. Also, being a nursery school teacher is not the first career choice for many. Often it is considered a convenient occupation that is compatible with the 24X7 responsibility that housework for a woman entails. It is only after one has jumped into the fray that one realizes the magnitude of the task.

A nursery school is perceived as an institute which is more of an offshoot of a business idea than an ideology implementation and its teacher often viewed as someone who can easily be replaced by the girl-next door who has just finished her high school. But if you get to spend a day in the classroom at SAPS, you’ll realize that it’ll make the most competent managers and psychologists feel inept as they deal with these adrenalin-filled missiles running about all over the place.

Imagine a room full of thirty voices clamouring for attention – “May I go to drink water”, “My mother’s got a baby from the hospital”, “My sister’s ill”, “I’ve left my English notebook at home”, “Are we going to do Maths first”, “This boy has hit me”, “I don’t have a pencil today”, “I have done all my homework”, “My dada-dadi have come from the village”, “Why didn’t you come to school yesterday”, “Someone has wet his pants”………the information onslaught for the teacher is like a dam whose walls have broken in a split second.

Drowned in this chaotic cacophony, she tries to stay afloat, takes her own decibel level up, asks, “Whose sister is unwell”; gives the Hindi equivalent of ‘sister’; asks, “How do we fall ill”; tells all about the germs attacking our body, explains ‘attack’ as something that a boy in the class has just done and finally gives her moral science bit on how hitting anyone is just not acceptable in her classroom. Being entrusted with this boiling cauldron, the teacher, threatening some, cajoling some and pacifying some, has to prepare her own cuisine of some exquisite and some mundane educational delights and present it in the most attractive way to appeal to the taste buds of these difficult customers’ minds. 

You can imagine what a balancing act it is for the teacher to give the kids the perfect concoction of discipline and affection, work within a schedule and grant them freedom of choice, work towards common goals and retain each child’s unique ability, hold their hand and yet make them feel independent, understand their mercurial moods and work upon it, say the same things at least 20 times and then answer the same thing again when a kid asks her for the 21^st time, make the class super exciting considering the children’s limited attention span, make them focus on the real while giving them wings of imagination, deal with 25 voices in the same second and satisfy all – teaching these packets of energy can be a physically draining experience. In spite of this staggering effort, there still remain some rebels or simply some highly evolved dreamers, who choose not to listen or understand and then the teacher has to be prudent enough to just let go. She has to make a go at them the next day. ‘Never Say Die’ is her middle name.

Such intense exhaustion, due to such committed application of effort, comes with its own set of emotional awards which are unmatched. A child is in love with his teacher, goes all out to impress her, stays melancholic the whole day if she is absent, does everything possible in his power to make the teacher happy. A smile or a word of encouragement from her can brighten his day. This is what more than makes up for the rigours of the teacher’s experience as she keeps pace with these atoms, who are in a constant state of motion, if not bodily, then definitely in their minds.

The teacher believes in earnest that each child has the innate ability to experiment, discover and learn. Her typical day at the job is spent providing opportunity, environment and training to each child to discover his/her natural aptitude; and exposing him/her to a world of new learning each moment. Her reward comes by way of seeing these young minds absorb and apply the learning and blossom to their full potential.

So much for idealism. Some parents feel that all this is mere rhetoric. There are a whole lot of parents who feel that whatever is being done in the classroom is not enough. They do not realize that in a 30-minute time span, the teacher, before she puts her chalk to the blackboard, discusses the topic at length, elicits response from all corners of the classroom, responds to them and corrects them wherever needed. This takes about 10 minutes. Then she writes one letter or one word or one sentence on the board. She moves about looking at each child’s notebook to see if they are noting down correctly. About 10 children have understood and are writing correctly. The rest, the teacher has to physically help out in all ways possible, explaining, writing, reading, neatness, formation of letters, even in getting the child’s concentration on track. With the best of her efforts a teacher can not give more than 2 minutes to each child. She does what is best possible in a class of 25 to 30 students, in the given time of half an hour. To cut a long story short, the school and the teacher are there to give direction, to make children understand a concept and how it works; but for practice, if there is not an equivalent support coming from the parents, that whole effort goes futile.

Right from tasting things for discriminating among various tastes such as sweet, sour, bitter etc, to hearing sounds made from various objects and identifying them, touching a cotton ball and a stone to identify hard and soft, mixing salt and sand in two different water containers to check out soluble and insolubles, the teacher turns each child turns into a little scientist. Memory games, sequential thinking strategies, activities to promote hand-eye co-ordination, sensory development by touching objects of different textures, experiments with plants and water in the classroom, the teacher is single-minded in her attempt to make her classroom an experiential learning process.

Teaching and learning are mutually symbiotic. The teacher too learns something new from her students each day. Her aim is to constantly adapt and re-invent herself in consonance with the changing needs of the children and the education pattern. Keeping in mind that there is no better way than experimentation, evaluation and drawing one’s own conclusion, she works on a KWL formula; K – stands for what the child already knows, W – for what the child has to learn and L –for what the child has finally learnt. The ambit of teacher’s delivery extends far beyond reading, writing and arithmetic to what real, pragmatic education and its application is all about.

A nursery school teacher may not be a rocket scientist or a neuro-surgeon but she sure is one who is laying the foundation for several such professionals in the making. Education begins on ‘Day One’ when a screaming infant enters this world and ends in that ‘Eternal Silence’ which will one day come to all of us. But in the time gap between ‘Day One’ and the ‘Eternal Silence’, the little time that a teacher spends with a child in a nursery school, her aim is not so much as schooling the children, as it is to help them develop their own school of thought. A school of thought which is in harmony with the larger rules of the world, and in harmony with the even larger laws of nature.