Life in the day of an English teacher
I like Dr Kancha Ilaiah (Why am I not a Hindu?) for one thing: he is a staunch advocate of English education. Although he means English-medium education. I feel my job is very important; I feel wanted. The rest of the time, my students give me as much importance as they give to a door-stop. Maybe a little more: my status in their eyes is perhaps that of the water cooler, around which they can chit chat. And yet, there is life in the day of yours truly, an English teacher at large. I teach adolescents and teenagers – from class VI to XII and each one presents a different challenge. But first let me make it clear that there is life in the day of an English teacher.

I work for a corporate educational organization which has operations from school level to IIT-JEE coaching classes. That means, my daily schedules are very odd. It has been ages since I have seen the dawn. This job makes it mandatory for me to get to work with sunrise; and my avocation –this newspaper column (which I put up on my blog) – keeps me going till sundown. Anyway let us talk about the day at work. I hate the morning hour as much as the students do but they are the pay masters: they can choose not to listen to my lectures, and keep talking in the class. How to handle them is a big challenge: the worst punishment one can deal out, according to school rules, is to send the student out. What does one do when half the class is chattering away?

You identify one of them and ask him or her to leave. The student is stubborn, stands there saying I am sorry sir, and refuses to move out. One student I managed to send out by threatening to go out myself turned so hostile, she does not indulge in the courtesy of wishing me good morning or good afternoon in the corridors. I am sure an adverse feedback would have gone to the management. Mercifully, they have taken me off that class and put a senior lecturer in my place.

Another interesting thing about this job is, some of the students know most of the stuff I teach in the class – they are the ones who came from ‘better’ schools. In fact, I had taken issues with Dr K Ilaiah elsewhere (What price English education, Deccan Herald, July 27, 2008; and What price English education -II, 14 August, 2008) saying that even if English medium education is introduced in government schools, they would not be able to compete with kids who go to Chirec or Oakridge or other such. We will deal with the benefits and otherwise of “English education” in a later piece.

One kid in class VI said, after my lesson on parts of speech: “Sir, we did all this in class II. And in class V we did phrases and clauses”. I had no answer for him. They blog, they write poetry, stories and stuff and bring it for me to ‘check’. They write fairly well. As well as I did in my MA days. Well, a good teacher is a constant learner. I get to learn from my students and honestly admit it: the students appreciate that.

However, not all students are from ‘good’ (or ‘better’) schools: there are still some who need my lectures and for their sake, I need to keep the others quiet and plod through the textbook. There is no one method that works. The best thing to do is to crack a joke. But that is not easy: in a class – let’s call it Darwin – of 55 students, with 35 percent girls and 62 percent boys (and two percent monkeys), one needs to be extremely cautious about the ground one is treading.

The bottomline is: cheating and teaching are anagrams, and they have something in common too.