Teachers - Unfair treatment

Teacher : "Ravi, if two and two is four, how much is twenty and twenty?"
Ravi : " That is not fair! You always do the easy ones and leave the hard ones for me."

Teaching profession is a difficult thing. Especially in the primary school level. If more than twenty years of your life are spent in interacting with very small kids, something will surely change in your mindset about the world, isn't it? Imagine, always living in a world where you knew all the answers. And, only you knew all the answers and no one else around you! You better be, when it is you who ask the questions in the first place...

Isn't there a danger of we getting a superiority complex when we are always surrounded by students with 'less' knowledge? When day in and day out, we keep 'teaching' them what they do not know?

And, like in the joke on top, you can answer easy questions and leave all the hard ones to the kids. Modern education system motivates the teachers to be friendly with the children, treat them as equals and importantly, to be honest with the kids. But, when I was a kid and went through one Government school after another in my school years, teachers were the most powerful creatures in the world. They did not teach us concepts or the logic behind many things - but merely made me get very good marks in the examinations, I guess. But, my reverence to some of them still stays. I thought at that time that they knew everything.

And, I can remember, some of them were quite charismatic! Being in a small town, they took liberty and went overboard - some of them kept cracking jokes, a few used to come to the school in white shirt and white pant; pop unbelievable questions in maths at you, but solve them in a few minutes; when we give answer sheets, they will tell you (without looking at it) the mistakes we would have made! My Tamil teacher, while teaching poetry, used to sing them all. High pitch and all that. I wish, we had such colourful personalities around us today...

The ancient practice of guru-shishya is gone now. Teaching is also a profession, even though some of them have passion to it. The personal link that a teacher enjoyed with the children and their families is gone now. We have big factories churning out students with impossibly high marks.

Personally for me, I will never be able to teach small children. I am sure, I will fail miserably. But, I enjoy teaching adults. The problem is that I know so little which adults want to learn. So, it is restricted to things like debit and credit, and of late, something to do with computers. Even there, I do the two and two, and give off the twenty and twenty to them!