The accidental teacher

S Upendran

Growing up in the laid-back city of Hyderabad in the 1960s, if somebody had told me then that I would earn my rice and curd teaching English, I would have probably laughed in his face. For you see, I had loftier ambitions then. As a kindergarten student, I had my heart set on becoming a bus conductor; later, it was an actor, and by the time I enrolled in the BA programme, I had dreams of bowling with Prasanna and Bedi. But none of these were meant to be, and like many in India, I became, what can be labelled ‘the accidental teacher’ – someone who drifts into the profession without giving the matter much thought. Of course, in my case, the choice of the profession did not set off seismic waves among the not so near and dear ones as I came from a family of teachers. For over four generations, all male members on my father’s side had been queuing up enthusiastically to enlist in the so-called noble profession. They had been moulding the impressionable minds of the younger generation of our country for well over a century; and considering the enormous mess they had created, it is not surprising that my daughters decided not to add to the country’s woes by following in the footsteps of their father, and those that preceded him. Instead, like Captain Kirk in the television series, Star Trek, they chose to boldly go, where their ancestors had not gone before!

Before joining the profession in 1983, I strongly believed that a teacher needed to make his classes lively by getting the students involved in the learning process. A classroom was to be a special place where the teacher and students could be themselves; where they could share their experience and knowledge. All these noble ideas, however, were flung aside, when I joined as lecturer at the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages in Hyderabad – an organization that I had the pleasure to serve for the next 37 years. CIEFL was a teacher training institute for mostly in-service teachers of languages; unlike me, most of the participants who came for the nine-month programme had several years of teaching experience. In my first year, when I was asked to co-teach on a course, the doubt that plagued me was why should battle scarred veterans lend a willing ear to a Johnny-come-lately or a greenhorn like me? The thought of being laughed out of the classroom haunted me, and it was then that I decided that I would put all my personal beliefs about effective teaching on the backburner, and instead, try and gain the participants’ respect by impressing them with my English. Using some of my former teachers as my role model, I decided that I would saunter into the classroom, park myself in a chair, and proceed to lecture eloquently for an hour – in short, I would talk, and the participants would listen. To this end, I spent hours rehearsing my 50-minute lecture standing in front of a full-length mirror. Experienced people know, of course, there is very often a big gap between what one intends to do and what one actually does – there’s many a slip between the cup and lip. In short, my performance in class, was not as smooth as the rehearsals – with the convoluted sentences often getting the tongue twisted with my tonsils, eloquence was markedly absent in the four lectures. As I stood there – for some strange reason, I never remembered to sit down for any of the classes – gaping like a goldfish, I recalled Kurtz’s famous last words in Joseph Conrad’s, Heart of Darkness – ‘The horror! The horror!’

When the four classes came to a merciful end, for both the participants and me, I spent some time doing a post-mortem and realized that they had been a fiasco because I was trying to be someone I was not. In my anxiety to get the participants to take me seriously, I was attempting to come across as someone who was serious and knowledgeable – a scholar who did not put up with nonsense in the classroom. As a result, I failed to bring into the classroom an element that made me, me. Not eloquence, but humour! A wise man once said that in order to be an effective teacher, one required three bones – a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone. Being a vegetarian, I cannot say anything about the importance of the wishbone. As for the backbone, one occasionally requires it in the classroom to stand up to the students; but if one wishes to survive the slings and arrows of the profession, a teacher requires, on a daily basis, the ‘humerus’ – the funny bone. For some reason, I had unconsciously chosen to keep this aspect of my character on a tight leash. After the disaster of my first experience, however, I let the little imp out of the bottle, and it resulted in a sea change in the classroom chemistry. I was no longer keen that the students saw me as a ‘scholar’ – a mine of information that they had free access to. I wanted the teaching-learning process to be an enjoyable one. ‘Learning should be fun’ became my oft repeated mantra, and I did everything possible to make it so. By 1987/88, I began using authentic materials – songs, movies, etc. – to help students improve their English. No matter what I was teaching, I made all my students sing English pop songs – and all of them did so without too many complaints. I began to understand what that famous nanny, Mary Poppins was trying to say, when she said, “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun, and snap! The job’s a game, and every task you undertake becomes a piece of cake.” Mercifully, very early in my career, I learnt that humour was the teaspoonful of sugar that helped the medicine – in this case, language classes – go down. But do we teachers really have a sense of humour? Of course, we do. Why else would we take up a job where the pay, most often, is a joke!

When I joined our humble profession, I was warned by the veterans in the field that if I wished to remain a teacher for any length of time, I needed to grow eyes on the back of my head, and fine tune the already existing sixth sense. Like most teachers, I acquired in a matter of few years, the required super powers to stay one step ahead of the students. My senses tingled à la Spiderman when mischief was afoot, and like Superman my super-hearing powers helped me detect the source of a careless whisper. I was the monarch of all that I surveyed; God was in his heaven, and all was right with the world! Or so I foolishly believed till the early years of the present century.

The classroom ceased to be my castle with the invasion of the cell phone. My lectures were frequently punctuated by the ringing of someone’s instrument, and the oft repeated mantra, ‘Please switch off your cell phones’, uttered before every class, failed to elicit the required response from the students. With the instruments becoming smaller, I found that I had to double my effort to stay half a step ahead of the students – not an easy thing to do considering the age difference between the teacher and the taught. I was frequently compelled to make quick dashes to different corners of the classroom to ensure that the students were not busy texting or playing some video game. Perhaps if I myself had been an enthusiastic user of the instrument, it would have helped me bond with my students.

In addition to the cell phone, the introduction of the Internet resulted in a major rethink about my role as teacher in the language classroom. In an age when unlimited information was available to the learner at the click of a button, there was a need for all teachers to redefine their role. I now saw myself as someone who should be in the know, but not necessarily be the font of knowledge. My role was to create and sustain the students’ interest in what was being taught. With plagiarism becoming rampant, I started getting students to write in class rather than at home, and then proceeded to have one on one sessions with them to give feedback. I realized that students found these ‘heart-to-heart’ sessions, which lasted anywhere between 15 to 30 minutes, much more useful than the general comments that teachers scribble on assignments. Of course, this meant that much of my lunch time was spent talking to students individually.

Given the current set of UGC rules, there is very little incentive for the teacher in a university to spend time with his students in such activities. For promotions, the sincerity and the teaching calibre of the individual are not taken into consideration; his value is determined by the number of publications he has to his credit, and the PhDs he has produced. How these things make someone an effective teacher is beyond me! What our country needs at the moment are good teachers and not, necessarily, great researchers. I suppose I should stop worrying about such matters for I have passed on the baton to the next generation of teachers. My only desire is that they should enjoy themselves as much as I did in my 40 years in the profession. Teaching and me…it was truly a match made in heaven! I’m just happy that I lucked out at least once! Happy Teacher’s Day!

The author is a retired teacher of English, and is currently playing the role of a ‘sitdown’ comedian, as he is too old to do a standup routine. He is an avid blogger (upendranskye.wordpress.com) and can be reached at supendran@gmail.com.