The teacher and the taught – Reflections of an obscure instructor

***This blog was written by a friend of mine (whom I lovingly call as a Capitalist-Comrade)- a teacher- with whom I have had numerous conversations about life in general. I have found him to be cerebral, brooding and with a fine sense of humour (& with superb sarcasm). He wrote this piece and wished to publish anonymously. I am the messenger- my LinkedIn platform the medium for his thoughts to be transmitted. Read on about his thoughts about essence of being a teacher, the profession, the nuances of their lives. This is a wonderful piece*** usual disclaimers apply.

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This blog post was triggered by a recent flurry of activity on my Linkedin account. The activity was triggered by my response to a kind compliment from a former student of mine. My response to the former student stated that I had a poster in my office that stared down at me every time I looked up from my desk. The poster simply said: You are a lousy teacher.

The poster is meant to remind me of how good I am as a teacher. Before I leave my desk for a class, I look at the poster for a few seconds, take a deep breath and remind myself of many shortcomings as a teacher and utter a silent prayer to the Lord to help me get better as a teacher.

The prayer reminds me to acknowledge that all that I could do is to merely try. Much of prayer is meant to do that I think -  although there have been the occasional miracles in my life that I believe may have been answers to my prayers.

The mention of the poster set off a few responses from my former students who are on my Linkedin network. They generously protested and said many things about how in their opinion I was a good teacher. 

The fact is that those students are the exceptions among the hundreds of students that have sat in my class, the vast majority of whom have a different opinion, quite likely diametrically opposite to those of the kind-hearted minority.

In general, the majority in the class influences the popular perceptions of one as a teacher. To make matters more interesting, in my case that majority does not have a homogeneous opinion about me. It ranges from indifference towards my performance as a teacher, to downright anger for a variety of reasons.  

Between these two ends of the spectrum the numerical score, the number called the teaching feedback that my school, like many others, collects on all of us teachers, every time we teach, usually takes a nosedive. 

The feedback is a destiny-defining number in the life of a modern teacher. As a teacher of finance I liken its role to that of the earnings per share in a capital market driven economy. Many may not agree with my choice of the simile, which is carefully considered.

If I am extraordinarily lucky the rating hovers around the mean for the cohort of teachers in that term, leaving me like the "living dead" or sideways deal in a venture investor's portfolio. On an average term I can and have fared much worse.

The reason I have that poster is to remind myself that, in terms of the feedback, at the end of eighteen years of teaching, I am nowhere close to being a star. To complete the picture I must also say that there are many colleagues who have made a habit of topping those charts, that you just yawn sometimes when you see their ratings. 

In my early years as a teacher, at the end of every course I would open the feedback with as much trepidation as those students of mine who were praying not to fail in my course must have opened their email communicating their grade. The feedback sheet would leave me utterly humbled when I opened it.  

Number noted, I would read the comments section in the feedback to see if there was anything that might soften the blow. The comments were even more humbling. There would be comments about my monotone voice, my lack of humour, the long and convoluted English sentences I spoke and so on. There would be comments about my not having used enough illustrations, having spent too much time on theory.  

There would also be the occasional ones that would make me laugh at myself in a tragicomic way. There was for example one comment that I shouted in the class that they could almost see smoke coming out of my ears. There was another one about how my blue shirt and black trouser that I wore to every class made them wonder if I ever washed my clothes. The moment of crowning glory was when a student published a book on campus life in which he said that I had single handedly destroyed his interest in finance.

The trivia aside, in many, if not most, institutions of higher education the teaching feedback seems to have a large role to play in the career development of a teacher. A recent example of this was when my 19 year old nephew, who is a student of science in a leading institution of eminence in science education in Bangalore, told me how he had done a good deed by giving a high rating to a terrible teacher who had appealed to the class for a generous feedback on the last day of his course.

It is not so much what the students think of one as a teacher that defines one's happiness or satisfaction. It is the opinion that the people who matter in the institution form about one as a teacher, based on what the students believe or reflect in the feedback form.

That makes for a depressing realisation every time one finishes teaching a course. Like the proverbial experimental monkey that avoids touching the bananas that give an electric shock one stops opening the feedback form. That does not mean that you can run away from ratings or the feedback score. Sooner or later a teacher’s rating would become the “basis of conversation”, to borrow a metaphor from a senior colleague of mine, between the teacher and the academic leadership that evaluates the teacher’s performance.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not against teachers being rated by their students. The only academic experience I have is of teaching in one single business school all my life, which is among India's best and most competitive. Students struggle to get in there. They pay an awful lot of money to be educated. It is but fair if they expect that the teachers they learn from perform (pun intended – sorry) well. Those that do not measure up need to pull up their socks. And those that cannot need to rethink their options.

Does that mean teacher ratings should matter less where education is more affordable? I do not know. I am reminded of my conversation with my landlord as I was about to join the place where I teach now. He was a professor of physics at IIT Delhi. He said to me as I returned the keys to his house, "So, welcome to the noble profession." I replied to him that I would be teaching in a business school, not in a college of science, humanities or arts, unlike him. He asked me how it differed. I could not articulate my response back then. 

With nearly two decades of teaching experience, if I were to meet him today I would say to him that I see myself more as a service provider of sorts, than the teacher in a traditional sense.  The price that students pay for their education, it appears, has a bearing on what is expected of the educator.

Like a performer I go to the class and derive joy out of what I teach, from the act of teaching. If there are words of appreciation you feel happy that you had a good show. On other days, you look back at your own show, feel elated by what you did right and try to improve anything that could do with some improvement. An arcane idea that could have been made more accessible, a problem that could have been solved more easily, a formula that you could help the student understand and remember better.

Every time I look at the poster in my office, just as it reminds me of the long path I still have to travel to evolve as a teacher, an even more powerful feeling of guilt engulfs me. More than forty years ago, as a fiery student leader, I accosted Dr Michael, my Physics teacher. I said to him that he was not discharging his duty as a teacher by not covering the portions on time. That academic year my college had worked for 40 days, thanks to frequent student unrest, often for no good reason.

Dr Michael was a soft spoken, kind hearted gentleman and a good teacher too. I could see the embarrassment and sadness on his face as I levelled that unkind charge. With genuine remorse he said to me and the other the students who had gathered around: I have failed you all as teacher. I will request the Head of the Department to find a better teacher for you for the rest of the course.  

We never saw him again in our class.

This was in a government college. The fees we paid was a pittance. Yet I had displayed an unbecoming sense of entitlement. 

This post is a one-sided perspective, needless to state. The student perspective of the relationship between the teacher and the student is entirely missing in this narrative. Unfortunately, I know of many a student suffering at the hands of an insensitive, even if competent, teacher. That makes it essential to have the other perspective too.

Teachers, unfortunately in my view, often do not live by the dictum that my wife and I saw in a school run by Sri Sri Ravishankar which says, “Teaching is a vocation of love. If you are incapable of loving, you should not be a teacher.” The moment my wife and I saw that poster in the school we stopped looking for another school for my sons. Truth be told, though, I have never even striven to live up to it myself.

I was lucky to have been taught by two such teachers who were full of love for their students. There was my English teacher at Loyola who wore his heart on his sleeve. As I was struggling with my Organic Chemistry paper at the third year university exam he stood beside and said with a smile full of kindness: “A hand that should be writing poetry is writing equations in Chemistry.” I was no poet in the making. But that was his way of making a mediocre student like me feel special. And motivate him to aim for the stars. Suddenly the organic chemistry paper did not look so formidable to me any more.

The other was the late Shri Narendra Prasad, at the Government Arts College in Trivandrum who later on made a mark in Malayalam movies. He loved me just because I claimed that I liked literature. He was so full of love for his students that he pleaded with the principal not to suspend me from attending classes for a mischief that I had committed in class and for which I well deserved to be expelled from college. So if I had a break free run in college I owe it to him.

Good teachers bring out the talent in the gifted student. Great teachers bring out the best in the mediocre, like Glenn Holland in the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus, like my literature teacher in Loyola, like Shri Narendra Prasad.

Coming back to my tryst with teaching feedback I have stopped looking at my feedback form for the past seven or eight years. Yet, year on year, there is one particular occasion where my feedback for the courses I taught during that year stares at me for a brief while, no matter if I wish to see it or not. My heart sinks unfailingly at that moment when I have to see my ratings. I think of the poster in my office. And then I am reminded of Dr. Michael. I ask myself if my annual angst is karma or nemesis at work.  

No matter what it is, I silently ask Dr. Michael for forgiveness. For, today as a teacher who experiences the pain of unflattering ratings from my students I realise how Dr. Michael must have felt the day my classmates and I had attacked him, in spite of all the effort he had put in to cover portions in the few days that the college was allowed to function by my agitating comrades and their unscrupulous political masters.

                                                                        An obscure instructor

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