Wednesday 24 July 2013

Goddesses of Very Small things


Making the Big from the Small...

       The matter of inspiration for this writing was one of my visits to my kid’s school. It gave me an unexpected opportunity to get a glimpse of a grade I class during the class hours. Oh!! It was a pretty big pandemonium there!!!! The chatterboxes were all doing a variety of things in the class and the poor teacher was standing there teaching (read shouting :)). Some of them even roaming about and there was this one tiny tot who managed to get out of the class (presumably to the washroom) and back in without the teacher noticing...WOW!!! – The scene said a lot of unspoken things.

      Teaching, the noblest walk of life was always a passion for me. Even from my childhood, I remember, I studied my lessons pretending to teach others. Or when it was the exams, I remember teaching my friends though I had not learned myself :P. In my dance classes, where I spent a majority of 15 years of my childhood, I was already teaching dance whenever my teacher was busy. I should say this gave me a tremendous opportunity to explore my teaching skills and that was when I realized my love for teaching.

       Anyways as time passed, for appeasing a lot of personal and financial goals, I had to fore go my teaching ambitions and landed up being a software programmer. I should say I was totally unaware of what life had in store for me……

      19 Dec 2006, I got my own lifetime student: P and the life time tests on my (highly accomplished) teaching skills started. It has been like teaching, teaching, and teaching him whatever I can :P, and whatever ‘HE’ wants!!. And now this little devilish creature is in his 2nd grade..., and guess what... I have already started “NOT” looking forward to my teaching sessions… because of just one reason - There I am passionately making my lecture, telling him inferences and reasons, making him memorize and write, and my adorable student sitting and asking me 101 questions of all the other things in the world and his opinion on each one of them … SIGH!!!!! It is really a terrible blow to the ego of “The self-proclaimed Teacher” in me…..:):):)

        If this is it, with just one little student whom you know in and out to manage…. What if you have to deal with a group of pixies at one go?? 

        This is exactly what the primary school teachers go through day in and out (Not that I degrade the higher ones  ... absolutely no...). But our society has this bad way of evaluating a teacher by asking in what grade he/she is teaching and if she says primary there is a pathetic “Oh...” sound following it. Qualification is one thing but the value of contribution to the society also has to be taken to account when we decide the social and financial value of any profession. 

       Primary school teachers definitely deserve much more respect, dignity, and of course pay for what they are doing. Considering they are actually laying the foundation for each of the children’s behavior and conduct in the society and the pain they have to endure for the same, let alone the pain for giving each of them personal care, we as a society are giving very less or no credits to them. They are not just teachers as we call them but…
The Gods/Goddesses of very small arrogant, irritant little creatures called Children!!!!

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