Engineer? Teacher? Cosmic Guide? Maybe all three..
Only two months ago I was on the verge of becoming a freshly minted mechanical engineer, one of the many things every Indian parent wants their child to be when they grow up. But something didn't feel right for me, engineering college had tried its best to snuff out the spark that I had in me as a kid, and what’s worse is that it almost succeeded.
I didn't want the same to happen to other children. So, to the horror of everyone around me, I looked up my high school teacher and asked him if he had a job for me. And yes, just like that, I decided to teach!
No one, myself included thought that I would ever teach. But now that I have started, only 2 months in, I could not be more excited!
I teach Math to an iridescent group of 13 year olds. I started off apprenticing under a great teacher, Mrs.Vasanthi Swamy, who helped me fall in love with Math while I was in school. Now, I have gained her trust to start putting my own stamp on the classroom that she teaches. I am acutely aware that I have a great opportunity now, and I realize that there’s so much that I can do with it. I can literally help shape the way the children in my care look at the world and enable them to discover their true potential!
Vasanthi Ma’am suggested I write down my goals for the class that I want to achieve by the end of the year, and I wanted to share them with you here.
There are three things I want my students to achieve:
I want them to be the masters of Mathematics, and fall madly in love with it.
Through my experience with engineering studies I realized I was very disconnected from the process of learning, and floated along in mediocrity most of the time.
I want a different future for them — I want to make Math fun for my students so that they never have that feeling. I want them to discover its wonders and to realize that Math is not the preserve of the chosen few but accessible to all who are willing to give it a shot.
Too often, students struggle with the constant feeling of being burdened or even overpowered by studies. Until a few months ago, I was no different. I was never counted among the gifted prodigies, in fact I have been pretty much an average student, nothing extraordinary. Therefore I know I can connect to most of my students, on average they are pretty average too (sorry, not so sorry!).
It is only recently that I have realized that we can choose to be extraordinary. I was a mediocre engineering student, but I am choosing to be an extraordinary teacher. It’s always a choice. I want them to have this realization as early as possible. I want them to recognize their inner spark, I want them to choose to transcend normal, to embrace what makes them special and then chase it with all their might.
I want to help them realize that they can’t get just anything that they want in life.
This might sound a little weird but if you think about it deeply enough, you will get the meaning. When we were kids, we were always told that we could have anything that we wanted in life. So we all wanted to be Astronauts and Superstars and Billionaires and Scientists, but it was only when we grew up that we realized it was so tough!
We talk about a lot of things but we rarely achieve any of them. It is very important to understand that it takes great effort to bring your dreams to life. It’s hard! But that’s exactly what makes it worth it.
I want my students to realize that they can achieve anything that they want in life, if they so choose they can be Astronauts or Superstars, Billionaires or Scientists, however every path they choose lies at the end of a long hard road. It is only accessible to the strong, the resilient, the passionate. They have to dream big but more importantly keep working when no one else believes in their dream, to have lofty goals but to keep pursuing them despite multiple failures, to follow their passions despite the world calling them crazy. And I will teach this to them by example, they will see that no one works harder than me.
I want them to embrace a cosmic identity.
An identity which is not limited to their immediate surroundings like their family, friends, school, city, state, community, religion or country. Embracing a cosmic identity means accepting that your identity lies with the cosmos, and that everything that exists in the cosmos is yours to preserve.
The thought behind this is simply that, the moment we take up a narrow identity, we have already put ourselves on a collision course with other humans and then clashes are inevitable — Indians vs Pakistanis, Hindus vs Muslims, Upper Caste vs Lower Caste, BJP supporters vs Congress, it’s only a matter of time before that happens.
Instead, if we embrace a cosmic identity, issues such as My pen, My book, My faith, My god, etc. things that form the basis of hatred and violence suddenly seems to vanish.
When we look back on the history of humanity, we find that the greatest damage has been caused not by the uneducated, but by educated fools. Therefore I feel it is very important to cultivate this sense of cosmic identity among children so as to ensure that we educate them in the right sense.
The way I am going to achieve this in my class is by maintaining a constant link between what we’re studying, why we’re studying and what impact can we make with that piece of knowledge. Exposing them to the blacks and whites of life and how everything that we do is always a choice and comes with consequences.
To conclude, my idea of having a great classroom isn’t just about Math, but it transcends the boundaries of classroom education. I believe education is not about what you learn in textbooks, but knowing what to do with the knowledge that you gain.
