The first, and last, lesson I learnt as a teacher is that the school is a very conservative institution. It took me a long time to accept it. But the day I did, I quit.
I was in my mid-20s when I gave up my banking job in Mumbai to work as an English teacher at a residential school in a hill station. I got free accommodation, free thukpa from the staff mess, and a bunch of colleagues with whom I played cricket during the lunch break every day.
There was no commute. I jogged on the football ground every morning, played table tennis in the afternoon, spent the evenings sitting under a tree by the lake, a book on my lap, reading less and distracted more by the fish going ‘plop’ in the water. Compared to my average day in Mumbai, which began with my armed (with leather bag) struggle to get into the 8.43 fast, and ended with me reduced to tears by recalcitrant auto drivers outside Andheri station, this was paradise.
At least it seemed so in the beginning. My teaching experience was zero. My qualifications were nonexistent. But I imagined I had the energy of youth and the zeal of idealism on my side.
Thankfully, the school did not have an HR department or I would never have got the job.
I wanted to be the student’s teacher — not the management’s teacher, nor the teacher’s teacher. I did not want to address a class, but relate to students at an individual level. I wouldn’t teach, I told myself, I would help the students learn by myself learning, and ‘pleasuring the text’ along with them.
I soon discovered that the toughest part of my job as a teacher, the one I hated, was ‘controlling’ the class. I hated it partly because I would hate to be controlled myself. I hated it also because it put me in an adversarial relationship with my students, whose friend I was supposed to be.
I had begun by refusing to control — by letting the kids decide what they wanted to do in class. Most days we did some activity or discussion centred on our textbook chapters. Some days, they wanted to play a game, say, dumb charades, we played dumb charades. On other days, they wanted to watch a film, we watched a film. Occasionally, they would ask to be left to themselves so they could prepare for a ‘class test’ in physics later in the day.
I would negotiate: 20 minutes of class, remaining 20 minutes you do what you want. And we got along fine. We learnt to respect each other, and they respected the fact that I treated them as my equal.
But this did not last long. The villain here, as is the villain everywhere, was the ‘system’. I was teaching class 12 of a CBSE school and I had a target: a syllabus of x chapters to be completed in y working days. My performance as a teacher was evaluated on the basis of how many marks my students scored in the Board exams. We no longer had the luxury of tarrying on the beautiful lines of a Robert Frost poem because there were another half a dozen poems to be annotated, and miles to go before the exams were cleared.
Soon, subjects universally acknowledged as ‘tougher’ than English — math and physics, in particular — took up all the mind space of the students. Other teachers sought to ‘borrow’ my classes as they were running behind schedule and struggling to finish the syllabus. “What use is getting 80 in English if the student failed in maths or physics?” said a senior teacher.
But then, I had to face the fact that I had my own syllabus to complete. I couldn’t go on being the nice, liberal English teacher and still do the job I was being paid to do. From being the student’s best pal, a Dr Jekyll who readily agreed that the poem ‘Daffodils’ could only be studied out there in the woods, under a tree, and not inside a classroom filled with chalk dust, I turned into a task master, a Mr Hyde who yelled at them if they didn’t give their assignments on time. As their ‘pre-boards’ came along, I was reduced to drilling them on previous years’ question papers.
I had come to teaching English with a certain expectation — of sharing the pleasures of reading and writing, of exploring with children the magical world of books. I refuse to call this expectation ‘utopian’ — for I did manage to realise it, even if only for a brief period of time. If anything, it was more practical than the syllabus fascism that took over our lives.
After all, it was your English class, English texts, and if you were lucky, your English teacher, who first made you think seriously, and independently, about the nature of love, about beauty, about honour, about life — about who you were, and why you were spending your life cooped up in a classroom. But independent thinking could not happen under duress, with ‘portions’ to be covered, competitions to be won, and projects to be submitted.
It wasn’t long before the school job began to feel more and more like the bank job I had quit. A series of tasks with deadlines to complete them in. The brightest students saw their own academic life that way — as a race to be won — and I couldn’t prove them wrong. The ones with a more romantic vision were soon brought into line by the regimental schedules, or dropped out, unable to cope.
It became clear that our school system was best designed to churn out disciplined employees who will punch in on time and show automatic deference to authority — it was not intended to nurture free spirits that can change the world, or even ask fundamental questions of it. Not a Whitman or a Tagore, but potted plants destined to inhabit the cubicles of the future.
If this is what teaching is going to be, I thought, why not return to the cubicle where I came from?
When I put in my papers, the loveliest farewell messages were from the students I had most problems with. The boy who was my ‘poorest student’, who I had berated the most in front of his classmates, sent me a card that read, ‘To my favouright English teacher, wid luv from his favouwrong student.’
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