Teacher’s Day is an occasion to celebrate the many roles teachers play, in shaping the lives of students and to serve communities they operate in. Though we can’t ever thank all the teachers enough who did lend us their passions and skills this is at least a moment to share our appreciation for their role in our lives. I very richly recall and revere at least four of them who I think made a difference in my life. The significant two were from the Carmel College where I graduated from and not the least, the erudite yet humble teachers from Goa University who taught me during PG and guided doctoral research. All of them changed my outlook to learning making significant impact on my professional life.
For seemingly small but engaging gestures to genuinely help and for constant words of encouragement to always perform better, I do remember my two teachers of Economics, Agustine Sir and Madam Radhika Nayak. Sir always taught with passion and was committed to my learning while Madam is my most influential role model whose sway goes far beyond my academic achievement. Today as I teach and try to reach out to my students, I constantly wonder whether I am doing enough to light their way as they did for me.
Madam Sylvia Noronha at the Goa University will ever be remembered to for her efforts to connect class learning to the world while Sudarsan Sir for his utmost humility in giving me my own space to learn at my own pace and motivating to implement mindfulness in research.
An important learning from the above influential four is that best teachers always inspire! Tina Seelig, the Stanford Professor and the bestselling author on Innovation Entrepreneurship very aptly puts it ‘teaching is about inspiration and not information’. In the era of Google and Wikipedia teachers are responsible for more than just academic enrichment. Teaching to be curious, to think differently and to relate to real life is what needed and not just passing instructions. The new world demands teaching to learn and not just academic training. Situations want teachers to be committed to students’ well-being both inside and outside the classroom by reaching them on multiple levels.
Given the technological distractions, peer pressures and helicopter parenting, it is a challenge to keep students engaged. Poor reading habits and lack of seriousness make it difficult for us to ask them challenging questions. The heck of administrative responsibilities (mostly clerical) and ever increasing expectations from Statutes belittles connecting to students beyond classrooms. These conditions will be here to stay and will accentuate. ‘You’ll are paid for it and get hefty salaries’ is the response from the management in return. The new norm for ‘inspired teacher’ will be the one who follows all laid protocols blindly without questioning.
Forcing Faculty Development Programs on teachers for engaging in ‘modern pedagogy’ and ‘student-centric teaching’ will sound hollow if teachers are not treated as ‘creative and learned fellow colleagues’ rather than ‘knowledge workers’. The potential of a teacher cannot flower given the tight budgets, infrastructural constraints, restricted virtue of freedom and challenged individual flexibility. Unless these new constraints are addressed the quality of teaching will not improve despite our GER inching upwards from 25.2 in 2016-17 to 25.8 percent in 2017-18.
In India by around 2030, more than 140 million people will be in the college-age group and this leads us to ask whether we will live up to the aim of delivering a world-class education system without inspired teachers?
Not surprisingly so, no Indian University was able to secure a place in the top 100 in the QS World University Ranking 2019. The recent report by CII-KPMG tilted ‘Improving learning outcomes by raising in-class teacher effectiveness’ points that despite achieving 100 percent enrolment at the primary level no much improvement can be seen in learning outcomes. The report therefore states ‘It is so fundamental for need to select, nurture and incentivise inspired teachers’.
Leave the teaching quality, the quantitative drop in the number of teachers is also a matter of concern.
The number of teachers in higher education has declined for the second consecutive year from 1.52 million in 2015-16 to 1.37 million in 2017-18 according to the government’s AISHE survey 2018. The pupil-teacher ratio went up from 20 to 25 in the same period but the number of universities steadily increased from 799 to 903 in the same periods. More shamefully, as much as 35 percent teacher posts are vacant in central universities and even when the ad-hoc, adjunct and visiting faculty are added, 19 % positions still remain vacant. The faculty vacancy in IIT’s is 34 percent.
This situation is no different at the schools. India is facing a humongous task of recruiting at least a million teachers both at primary and secondary level. The World Bank report titled “Getting the Right Teachers into the Right Schools” highlights that approximately there are 1.30 lakh single-teacher schools in India. By 2030, the world needs 25.8 million more teachers while in India we will fall short of 1 million teachers not forgetting that about 11 lakh teachers currently teaching in schools are not properly trained.
The above crises in teaching notwithstanding, millions of teachers toil to put in their best, day in and out. They ignite hope and drive away despair. For many of us in the profession, passions of like of Agustine, Sudarsan, Noronha and Radhika continue to inspire.
