Cerebrating Teachers’ Day

While we have clarity about how Teachers ought to be, we do need to know how not to be. Sometimes, I have failed to know the difference between them. Here are five of my reflections on teacher conduct, on this 5th September.

1. IF THERE’S A GOD, IT’S ME! Competence, achievements and some amount of appreciation could lead teachers to develop a sense of infallibility and superiority. They could demand privileges and justify their acts of arrogance. In an age of irreverence, god complex is plainly inane.
2. LEND ME YOUR EARS, HEART, SOUL AND MOBILE PHONES! IN EXCHANGE, YOU HAVE MY GOLDEN VOICE AND PEARLS OF WISDOM! There are teacher types who consider their role is to teach. And so they lecture and lecture and expect the outcomes to align on their own. Wrong! The role of a teacher is to ensure learning. Listening to the learner and understanding their contexts, tastes and needs is a mandatory starting point to facilitate learning.
3. WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM? LOW SCORES? BREAKUP? TOOTHACHE? WHATEVER BE IT, HERE ARE MY PRESCRIPTIONS! Qualifications to validate one’s mastery over a knowledge domain, platforms to speak from, arrested audiences to follow one’s lectures, can all mislead us teachers to lose sense of where our expertise ends and ignorance begins. With supreme confidence and shallow understanding, sometimes we tend to pontificate about a variety of issues. We need to exercise caution and know our boundaries.
4. I DON’T KNOW TECHNOLOGY. ACTUALLY, I DON’T NEED TO! In a VUCAD world, many forms of conventional knowledge carriers are often precariously positioned. They might indulge in claiming that what they know is of timeless value, while dismissing recent developments as passing fads. The problem is, placing absolute trust in what one learned eons ago, without updating knowledge to account for the dynamic shifts occurring around us, is a surefire way to fail. It’s a way of letting down oneself and negatively impacting the learning of others who depend on us. We ought to know about the enabling and disabling features that large language models bring along, the future of human-computer interactions, and of course the perils of tech-solutionism.?
5. YOU CALL ME “SIR” FOR A REASON! SIRcasm IS MY BIRTHRIGHT! My caustic comments are there not to hurt you, but to correct you. I hope you are bright and robust enough to own it that way. “If you say ‘ouch!’I'm charmed!” Such approaches to chastising students may only serve to massage one’s ego and end up misdirecting the core message. Being a teacher is no license to be disrespectful.

?Happy Teachers’ Day! Let’s cerebrate!