Revisiting a premise

Neeraja Raghavan

As a teacher, how often have you felt that you were knocking your head against a wall?

That no matter how hard you try, this student is simply not getting it?

And have you given up sometimes, realizing that you are human and can’t possibly reach out to every single child?

If you have, then this account will resonate with you.

I recently spoke to a teacher with four decades of experience and was amazed at her description of the turning point in her teaching journey. It is a story with a familiar beginning: of a lady who slipped into the profession by chance and not choice.

Somewhere along the way, she came across a student who posed a huge challenge: he just didn’t seem to absorb anything that she taught him. Try as she might, she couldn’t succeed in getting across to the boy. He failed his end-of-year exams twice.

Frustrated with her persistent efforts falling flat each time, she went with the problem to her principal. At that time, the school policy allowed a teacher to request that the school dismiss a student who failed twice in the same grade. (When she spoke to me, however, this was no longer true.)

So this despairing teacher made a sound case before her principal to dismiss this ‘good-for-nothing’ boy, and answered every question posed by the principal with convincing answers to support her case. “Surely he was good at something?” insisted the principal. No, he wasn’t, asserted this teacher firmly.

And so the errant boy was indeed dismissed.

The academic year ended, and the teacher resumed her teaching duties the next year. Seeing her batch of promoted students, she noticed the absence of that boy. Upon enquiring about his whereabouts, she received the shocking reply: “He is working in a cycle repair shop.”

That hit her like a ton of bricks.

Slowly, she came to know that he was the son of a gardener, who (what is worse) was a drunkard.

And she had ensured that such a boy never received a school education! Worse, she had even felt proud of that move!

This was the turning point in her life.

She switched instantly from being a teacher to a researcher.

What was the cause of a child not performing well?

Was it always sheer indifference?

Could there be other reasons?

With an undying thirst, this teacher began to learn about learning disabilities and methods of teaching children who faced difficulty. This was in the era before the internet, so there was no instant click of a button to help her. Her hunger to learn was the ‘mouse’ that she kept clicking. It was also the period when an awareness of children with special needs was low: unlike today.

As she began examining the specific difficulties that children faced, her paths crossed specialists in NIMHANS, Bengaluru, resource centres and workshops that she scoured the daily newspapers for announcements of. This led to her forming a section in her school for children with specific learning needs, where she and her equally enthusiastic colleague designed tailor-made lessons for their students.

As she developed customized methods to tackle specific learning difficulties of students, that boy she had been instrumental in dismissing kept popping up in her mind. And guess what she did? She went on a search: for that student! Not only did she find him two years later, but he was re-enrolled in her school and she succeeded in helping him pass the class X board exam!

Not surprisingly, this teacher won the NCERT Award for being an innovative teacher: but more than any award, her unique retracing of steps to correct a biased premise is priceless indeed.

What could well have continued as a mechanical emphasis on performance alone, heedless of underlying causes for failure, made this teacher go out of her way to reflect upon (and understand) the root cause of such difficulties.

Watch her detailed narration of her journey here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thW_fh5sSQ0&t=9s

The author is founder-director of Thinking Teacher (www.thinkingteacher.in), an organization that networks with teachers across the country. Thinking Teacher aims to awaken and nurture the reflective practitioner within each teacher. Thinking Teacher’s goal is to help build deep inquiry and rich learning into the teaching process. The author can be reached at neeraja@thinkingteacher.in.