Joy and Teaching

Experiencing Joy

We call it Joy of Teaching because we sincerely felt that with all its standardizations, norms and policies, teaching has come to be viewed as a mechanized process of bombarding learners with information. Teachers feel overwhelmed, exhausted, confused and frustrated just like anyone who goes to work. Joyful Teaching sounds like an oxymoron to many teachers who experience teaching as a dull, monotonous, repetitive process. The Joy factor seems to have been removed from teaching. These series of articles is our humble attempt to revive that joy, to give an energy push to the teacher and to bring back that joyful vibrance by looking at some fundamental aspects of teaching.

So what is Joy? Joy is a feeling that combines happiness, pleasure and elation. Joy is not an end goal but an emotion that we experience while doing or going through something that is close to our heart. Joy is a certain positive energy that flows through us when we are deeply involved with something. The Joy of Teaching is to do with that happiness we experience while playing the role of a teacher. When we are deeply involved with something, our favorite activity, what do we experience? Most people may not have the right words to express their experience because whenever we do something we like, the “I” temporarily disappears and we become one with the activity. Have you seen children in the playground? They would be so involved that they wouldn’t be thinking of anything. The mind isn’t pondering over anything at that time, they are not themselves there. They completely lose themselves to the game they are playing. Though they are in full action, there is no stress, the are not tensed but they are just fully participating in the process.

Once it so happened that Smrithi, during her school days, was painting something. She was so involved in the activity that she did not even notice her maid come, do all the dishes and mop the floor. Her mother came home and asked if the maid had come and Smrithi had no clue what to say. Her mother, looking at a clean kitchen remarked “What if a thief had wiped our house clean?”. We are talking of involvement but not the involvement that makes you lose awareness of the surroundings :-) .

When we say Joy of Teaching, we refer to the inner state that we experience when we teach with passion and involvement. While we do experience moments of tremendous joy, those moments seem to be fleeting. We cannot guarantee that it will last long nor do we know how to experience it and sustain the experience.

We need to identify the various aspects that help us experience the Joy of Teaching and consciously work on those aspects to make it a more sustainable experience. In the next articles we shall look at some interesting happiness models that we can apply to ourselves and our students. These models will further strengthen our conviction in the teaching and learning process.