Harish Palaniappan's

No its not teacher's day today.. but I am writing this post so late.. yea, I seem to always write delayed posts especially because I am probably not specifically a writer who can get used to writing stuff because there's this occasion or something.

I think some discussions with friends at cry.org volunteer meet-ups, have got my head rolling on some thoughts on education, standards of education in India, and what quality of teachers we have at schools, etc.,

While I am probably a 51% pessimist, and would love to use another opportunity to critique the system like it is most often in my posts, this one is for good teachers I have seen, who have inspired me to see things differently.

My favorite subjects at school were simply the ones taught by my favorite teachers at school.. I tend to believe it is so for everyone, that they start having a liking a subject if that subject's teacher is very kind, inspiring and motivating apart from being a good, communicative teacher.

And my most hated subject was zoology, its not that I don't like animals or anything, but because my zoology teacher always found interesting ways to harass me or humiliate me in front of the class because my scores were extra-ordinarily low in her subject.. probably she strangely thought that all her humiliation was going to improve my interest towards the subject.

Botany (and biology later) were my all-time favorites because of my botany teacher at school.. who went great extents to teach the subject more lively and innovatively.. For that, she would go all extent around the city, to find some plants or animals and bring them to the class to show us live what is 'moss' or, how an owl's eyes really looked, or how a rat goes to sleep long hours after smelling some chloroform.
She would give us interesting homework.. "catch a cockroach".. she would even explain where we can find cockroaches at home... how to catch them by their antennas.. how to pack them alive in polythene packs... and bring them to class the next day. the next day morning, even before school starts everyone would be trying to show-off their designer cockroaches and start exaggerating about why their cockroach find is more looky and fashionable and brave than what other people have caught. All that discussion would trigger a great interest to wait wait and wait eagerly till the botany class happens in the evening.
A few minutes after the class starts, we would all be doing the most obvious thing, tearing a leg or antenna from our cockroaches and counting how many segments are there as per the diagram on board.. Obviously you could hear girl screams from the 10th standard biology lab in our school every wednesday at 1pm.. (it is AVM school vadapalani chennai if you want to check out.. but i don't know whether they still do it so interesting even today.. or whether that inspiring teacher still works there).. even some boys faint, let alone girls.
Unfortunately, my interests were more to computers later, and I didn't specialize in biology in 11th or 12th.. otherwise I could have killed more rats, cockroaches, and all that. I heard many years back that one of the guys got very inspired and became a professional snake catcher... i dont know whether it was a rumour.

Physics:
My physics teacher was a young man in his 20's and he was one of the non-english teachers who spoke good, clear english. Before every physics class, two students would go and bring something from the physics lab into the class, and the teacher would follow. "So, what are we going to see today" was the surprise.. most often he would bring some boring shiny ball tied to a long string and let it oscillate from his table and ask us watch it.. "the pendulum and oscillations changed a lot in physics" he would say.. what! this string and the ball changed everything.. this man is nuts I would think.. until I learnt about oscillators and more science and more equipment in electronics at college.
Once, while he was teaching and writing the word 'parallelogram' on the board, he forgot whether it was single or double 'l'... (today we can dismiss such things as not a mistake, because we have American and British spellings always to justify mistakes). this spell check thingy caught him un-awares, and he was probably slightly embarrassed that he forgot the spelling.. for that one student even got excited and pulled the chalk out of the physics master's hand and added one more 'l' to the word to the laughter of the class.. 'Sir' was ok with that.. but probably he planned all day until next class to talk something about it.
The next day, the first thing he told in the physics class was.. a story of newton's real life, and how newton made small small mistakes in real life.. we all listened to the interesting story without realizing why he was telling us the story.. after the story, he said.. "this is how big people forget small things often.. " with a grin on his face depicting that he was a big shot like newton and forgetting two 'l's for that word was ok. everyone had a good laugh.. and many of us particularly admired his way of smartly justifying the previous day's joke on him.

There were quite a few teachers like this.. and quite a few teachers who would do nothing but read out from books or small bits of paper they made notes on. Similar experiences at college too.

Probably these experiences got me interested in teaching.. though I have not particularly been a teacher anywhere except for the 3 or 4 classes I enjoyed taking at my previous employment.. but unfortunately on programming and technologies.. not my favorite subjects.

Whenever I hear some interesting story or experience of a teacher.. or a student saying or blogging about his/her teacher, I tune in and start imagining the story.

Today, I was reading this friend's blog who has posted something on her experience with students.. which was touchy.

Western education system:
How can I end this post without comparisons with the western systems of education:

I have different perceptions about quality of education in other countries, and they keep changing simply because I have never visited (leave alone living in) a different country. But, the idea of schooling / education or the grade system or the syllabi, taken anything, I always have an unanimous feeling that the west's school system is best organized.. in terms of all that.. and importantly the policies and the education system itself.

The best thing I have heard about American schooling is, it seems they even recognize grades from home-schooling under certain conditions, which means students could study from home and still be eligible to apply to colleges when they are ready.. Imagine! .. if we had a proper system like that in India, it would mean, any child can study from home itself even if he/she is poor or cannot travel far for school, or doesn't have to quit education itself just because his/her poor parents find work in a different place away from school every few months. The kid, could still study from home, take up tests at centers, and still be eligible for college if only he/she had the drive and motivation to do so.

That would be interesting.