What made my awesome teachers 'awesome'?

I was in grade four. I had to read the 'thought for the day' in the school assembly, my first experience in public speaking. It was two simple sentences - “A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it is not open.” The host introduced me when my turn came. Needless to say, I was nervous. The teacher who had  nominated me for the task literally pushed me on the dais. I went up to the stage and without adjusting the microphone, read the quote, fumbled with a two- three words (25% of all I had in my kitty) said a thank you and rushed off the dais. After I walked off the stage, the next speaker spoke. Once he finished, my housemaster came up to me and said - "You read well. Did you notice how he spoke (pointing to the next speaker)? You must take a few cues from him to become even better."

That was a big moment - my housemaster had personally acknowledged my presence. The onus was on me to live up to his expectations. From then on, I spoke frequently during the assembly, gaining more confidence. I went on to become one of the best speakers in school and college, winning many competitions in public speaking and debating.

More importantly, that teacher who had first nominated me to read the quote became my mentor. She was in many ways responsible for the confident individual I became. She was one of the few teachers among the many I would meet during secondary and high school, bachelors and masters programmes from who I learnt.

With less than a month to go before I begin my stint as a teacher, I want to summarize what I admired the most in my favourite teachers as their student. I may lose the sense of objectivity if I do this after I start teaching.

Great teachers make you work hard

I have attended many courses whose lecture I have bunked because I had a lousy teacher. At the same time, I have attended some courses where I have attended extra lectures because I enjoyed learning with those teachers. In the latter case, I have also spent more time and effort on my homework and projects.

Even the lousiest of students easily distinguish which teachers genuinely want their good and which teachers are aimlessly spending time in the class. As a result, the effort of students is directly proportional to that of the teacher. It is not surprising that some of our favourite subjects are the ones which we were taught by our most loved teachers early in school.

Great teachers show you the destination, but let you find your own path

I have been watching the documentary "The Story of India" by Michael Wood, which I highly recommend to all Indians. I frankly had no sense of pride in our country (barring some great Indians) until I saw the origins of its culture and ethos in the documentary, beautifully summarizing India's greatness. I will blog about it in another post, but the point I want to make is that I hated Indian history in school. It was a bunch of dates, names, places and events. Instead it should have been an epic story where students were forced to reason, understand stand points of key characters or ideologies and derive lessons for the future.

Effort alone is not even to encourage students. Students want more. They want teachers to drive their curiousity and take them on a journey of discovery. Great teachers present complete facts and enable students to build their own opinions and conclusions, which is critical to develop wisdom and intelligence. Spoon feeding has become a sorry trend in the education industry where focus is on memorizing facts instead of arriving at them through logical and scientific reasoning.

Great teachers are approachable and have no ego

I could always strike up a conversation with my best teachers and ask them anything anytime. Many a time, my questions were not even related to what was being taught in the classroom. Never did they take a question personally. Never did they not respond. Never did they mock the stupidity of the question. That is what made them likable.

Great teachers are like a more experienced friend. They don't give you the perception that they want to control your opinions, activities or life.  You feel like spending more time with them because they are so much fun to be around. You want to do their work well so that you are liked by them.

Great teachers don't give up on you

I had not joined tuitions throughout my school life. In grade X, I came across a math teacher who was disinterested in teaching. I was a bright student but I was struggling to cope with the syllabus in his class. Others were doing much worse. I had got a 75 in math in the first semester, which was probably the worst I had got in my entire school life. Fortunately, he was forced to quit his job due to unforeseen circumstances. A good teacher who had taught us before, replaced him.

He spent tremendous amount of time in extra classes to help us cope with the time lost. In addition, he organized at his home, extra sessions for small group of students of similar calibre to meet our personalized requirements (these were not tuitions).  I did phenomenally well in Math in my boards, topping the school. It was only because of his effort in making ALL of us learn.

This is probably the most important point that makes great teachers stand out. They never give up on any student in class. They set different measures of success for each student and help them meet those standards. It is what makes their job incredibly hard, but it also makes it incredibly rewarding. That is why those teachers are respected the most among the hundreds that students come across in their lives.

It is not a coincidence that a teacher becomes great. It is a result of many hours spent on planning and practicing every lesson and many years of handling the classroom. It is the sum of many answers given many a time, sometimes to the same individual. It is resisting the urge to give a ‘one size fits all’ lecture when it gets unbearable. It must not be easy, but it must be worth it to persist day after day, year after year, for every student is a teacher's legacy.

The Coming of Spring

For a clear blue sky and a warmer day
Even the long winters have to make way
A gift of nature is unwrapped
As the white cover of snow melts away

Like a drop of colour on a black and white painting
A green off shoot of leaves emerges from hiding
The birds return, chirpier than ever
Waking the other residents to an early morning

While others welcome with open hands
Man's tentativeness in his way stands
For his priority is his own comfort, and
Weather is known for unpredictable trends

God thinks of him in a mocking manner
"Evolution made you independent and smarter
But it took away from you the joy of small things
Of which and yours, I will always remain a Master"

Nothing remained, not even a memory

Most of these people were loyal to the countries they resided in, with many generations of their family spending all their lives in the same country. They worked as responsible citizens, paid their taxes and lived as per the law of the land. Some had even fought for their countries in the wars that transpired in the decades preceding 1935. They belonged to countries across the length and breadth of Europe (barring a few like Switzerland).

There were 9 million of them before the holocaust. Only 3 million remained by 1945. The remaining 6 million, including 3 million men, 2 million women and 1 million children, were killed in over 3 years. Whole families and in many cases villages were destroyed. As a result, we don't even know the names of the many who died - literally the existence of a soul was wiped out from every living memory. If you still haven't guessed who I am talking about, I am talking about the murdered Jews of Europe, the memorial of whom I recently visited in Berlin.

Achieving the number across the expanse of a continent in such a short time is no mere feat. Mass murder factories were created with an immaculate logistics system, to identify, segregate, hunt, capture, displace, store, transfer, torture, experiment with and kill in the most inhumane ways possible. The average life expectancy of these people once they reached the death camps was 3 months, depending on their ability to do productive work for their captors and their resistance to the torture before their bodies or minds broke.

What was more shocking is what drove the people who managed the system of mass killing, especially those in the frontlines who were finally responsible for torturing or killing these people, day after day, year after year. I happened to listen to the words of a letter one such Nazi SS officer wrote to his family expressing the joy of having just killed some 100 women and children after having made them dig their own pit (yes, they did not even get a grave to themselves). I was amazed at the amount of unprovoked hatred that a manifesto, which was written on the basis of what could be if the Jews were allowed to thrive, could trigger.

More moving though were the biographies of the 15 families that historians were able to trace and the original transcripts of the letters and diary entries, which written by some of the vicitims who were murdered. I particularly was touched by these letters/entries:

"What is my life worth even if I remain alive? Whom to return to in my old home town of Warsaw? For what and for whom do I carry on this pursuit of life, enduring, holding out - for what?!" - Chronicler Herman Kruk, murdered in a German Concentration Camp in Estonia on 18th September 1944.

"Autum now. September 1. September resettlement with its horrors. A story in itself. It doesn't especially need to be recorded here. If something like that was possible, what else would be? Why war still? Why hunger still? Why a world still?" - Viennese writer and journalist Oskar Rosenfield, murdered in Auschwitz in 1944.

"31st July 1942. Dear Father! I am saying goodbye to you before I die. We would so love to live, but they won't let us and we will die. I am scared of this death, because the small children are thrown alive into the pit.  Goodbye forever. I kiss you tenderly. Yours J." - post script under her mother's letter written by 12 year old Judith Wishnyatskaya, killed in Bylten, Poland in July 1942 .

We have all covered, in great detail, the subject of the first and second World War (WW I and WW II) in our history text books. While our books do cover the world wars in great detail, they seem to overlook the extent of the holocaust. When I visited the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, I realized what my history text book should have taught me was more than just the dates of invasion, the names of the key participants and the  various phases of the war that led to the victory of the Allied Forces.

They should have taught me that: Murder, torture and extermination are bad. War and violence  should be the last resort of solving problems. Xenophobia is detrimental to the country. Brotherhood among citizens is beneficial. 

What is the use of history, if we do not learn lessons from it. I am reminded of the lines by Italian writer and Survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp Primo Levi,  which were written on the wall at the beginning of our walk through the memorial -“We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.”

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

If you consider an activity important, you will make time for it

The first thing I wear after my morning shower is not an item of clothing nor a perfume, it is my watch because I think it is extremely important to be on time in everything you do. If in the unlikely event where it is not possible, you must at least have the courtesy to inform the concerned parties. However, that is no excuse for being late every time.

I am often told I create an unnecessary fuss about being on time. Why shouldn't I? Why should "I will see you at 7PM" mean "I will see you anytime between 7.10PM to 8.00PM"? Why should "I will be there in 5 minutes" mean "I will see you in 20 minutes", unless of course, you are an extraterrestrial from a planet that spins faster or slower than Earth?  The idea of time emerged from the need of having a  standard universal scale to synchronize different activities. Our poly-chromatic perception of time leads to losses of varying nature.

The first loss is that of time that could be well utilized in a productive or leisure activity of your choice, as and when you fell like. This could further translate into different losses -  loss of health due to the undue stress these delays cause, loss of wealth due to the money that could be earned in the process, loss of respect, for the person who should have been on time and loss of interest in the purpose of the meeting or activity in the first place. Personally, I do take a person's timeliness as a statement of his professionalism and commitment to the objective of the meeting.

Moreover, I do not buy the argument that we Indians should be okay operating on a 'stretchable' timeline than a 'standard' timeline. We claim we work harder because we spend 16 hours a day working. If you are an Indian, think about honest answers to the following questions. What percentage of the office hours do you spend doing productive work? How long are your lunch breaks? How frequent are your tea breaks? How much time do you spend attending to personal commitments at work? How many deadlines do you miss? How much time do you spend deliberating a decision and shifting blame? Whatever be the reasons, these answers offer glaring insights into our delusional perception of our work commitment in the veil of the number of hours spent at work. While we were once a great civilization, by modern world standards, we are highly inefficient and cannot expect ourselves to become an economic giant in the future.

Let me try and quantify this loss for you. We are a country of one billion people. Nearly 60% of population falls in the productive work force age. Taking a conservative estimate, assuming each person wastes 10 minutes of his time, you have 600 million people wasting 6 billion minutes or 100 million hours every day of work time. While it is a crude estimate, our lack of productivity or our inefficiency  is a strong reason why we have not been able to bring about equitable growth in the country.

I am afraid I will have to stop my rant here. I have exhausted the time I had assigned to writing this post. In the meanwhile, I hope you do take out some time to ponder over what I have just said. And God save you if you are late for a meeting with me. 

The Cage

I am moving on from a well paying managerial job in an MNC to a fellowship in a non-profit organization that pays a meagre stipend. As the news spreads through my company, I am greeted by more and more reactions stating how I have got my priorities right early in my life and how it is a noble course to take. It was humbling when a colleague and friend  (who was high) confessed to others at a party that I was the only man there who had the courage to listen to the voice of his heart and follow it.

I appreciate all the encouragement and am glad many have been supportive of my decision.  As I talk to more people with a background similar to mine, each of them mention the choice they had in their past when they could have taken a path that led to the destination of their calling, but didn't. However, they never delve into the reasons.

Standing at the same cross road as they did then and putting myself in their shoes, I look at the alternate path that lies ahead of me, the accepted and preferred path. I continue working with my current organization. I earn a comfortable livelihood, which keeps growing year on year. I keep climbing up the corporate ladder. I hopefully gain respect of people for what I have achieved. I earn more so to save taxes, I invest more.I buy a house. I buy a car and few years later, replace it with a fancier one. I invest in the markets. I secure my future through more and more insurance to keep up with my lifestyle. I have enough to buy another house.

Simultaneously, on the personal front, I get married. I have kids. I send them to good schools. My parents retire. I grow older.  I begin to feel I have achieved what I set out for in my professional career. I want to do something new, but I haven't planned for an early exit. For starters, the home loan installments are pending for another 7 years. I want to travel the world, but my parents are old and unwell. While I have insurance to manage their medical expenses, it does not replace their need for personal attention. I want to give back to the society and all I have time for is making donations and raising funds for the causes I believe in.

While what I am doing is acceptable, it is  not what I truly wish for. However, my hands are tied. I am scared. The opportunity costs are high. The risk is not worth taking. I do not have time to recover, if I fail. I am caged in my own success, materialism and commitments.

 I think of the cross road I stood on 25 years ago. I think of the life that could have been.

Song on my mind: