Moving Beyond Judgements on Symptoms
Usually when we meet somebody, we do a quick analysis of their behaviour, attitude and categorize them into a type of a person.
Add to this, the extreme situation of being in a rural government office conducting a workshop for 114 unhappy teachers. The ones who walk in after lunch with their own panache are usually seen with exasperation(Dictionary meaning: a feeling of intense irritation or annoyance). You wonder what they do in their schools. And in this case, we were beautifully mistaken.
The appearance and attitude of a person is determined by the situation they are in. And yet many a times, we judge the human and not the situation.
When we are trying to understand a person, what we have in front is usually their present selves. And based on these interactions with the present self, we start laying the foundation of our understanding. But we are all a work of time and a work in progress. Burdens of past have shaped the mountains of present. Rarely do we get a chance to see the whole story.
Working in government schools, this business of judgement is risky but used on a daily basis.
Anybody who walks into a school is quickly judged, “are they here to audit us/fight with us/support us/eat our heads”? This culture exists because a situation has been created where the government school teacher feels they are always being judged. They fear the judgement of their superiors. They feel the community has already judged them as useless. The respect that a teacher of bygone times must have felt seeping inside them has been replaced with fears.
The stereotype of a government school teacher is of the one who sits and passes time, gets paid a lot and yet fails to deliver. In every system, there will be a few of those. But when they come to represent the entire system, we have to ask the deeper question of understanding the whole story.
In the education sector, “motivation of teachers” has become a fancy keyword. Lots of organizations claim to be working on motivating teachers, long research papers have been written on measuring and assessing the motivation of teachers. There is a belief that by motivating teachers, we can improve the public education system. In this equation, it seems as if teachers and their demotivation is the clog in the learning cycle.
The problem is we are looking at “demotivation” from the teacher’s present selves. They did not start their job being demotivated. One of our teachers, whom previously I had seen through the lens of “present selves” seemed to be somebody who was concerned with finishing her work. And this week, when I was sitting in her class and observing her children, I learned a beautiful lesson. It was the second day of the new academic year, she had begun by teaching the concept of “place value” to her third graders. And bang in the middle of her lesson, a trail of new children started walking into her classroom. They came in groups and said the headmaster had sent them.
Our teacher left what she had begun and started assessing the new children, in order to understand their learning levels. Soon there were nine new children in the classroom with no space for them to sit. Her classroom currently does not have a fan yet. (She had a put a fan twice last year but it got stolen both times.) The room which just fifteen minutes ago was a learning space had now become stuffy and noisy. The teacher was feeling angry and left the room to talk to the headmaster about this sudden intrusion.
When she came back, she had accepted the decision. She shared that she was feeling angry. And when trying to be supportive, we quipped that it will be difficult to teach 50 children in a stuffy classroom, her reply caught us by surprise. She narrated that in her first year as a teacher, she had taught a class of 125 children. And very recently when she had gone as an invigilator for the board examinations, she met most of her children from the first batch who were now writing their grade 12 exams. She felt proud of them and they of her.
And then she shared that her present self is weaker than her past self, her health has become worse and that has lowered her stamina. And this is how in her present self, somebody might judge her to be “demotivated” teacher.
We need to understand the whole story before we come to a judgment. Isn’t it?
Thanks to our mentors & supporters, we are finally able to cut across the noise in education space and see the light to strengthen public education in a systemic way. This stands on idea of bringing structural changes. How do we take everyone beyond judgements on symptoms and move towards systemic change ?
