A labour of love

I have had the best teachers. This is one of the huge blessings of my life, along with an incredible (far from perfect but incredible) family. 

I have not always learnt perfectly from my teachers. Sometimes, I have been less prepared coming into that year's curriculum and sometimes, less prepared for class. Sometimes, I have been distracted by the drama of life. Sometimes, I have just found the subject tedious (sorry, Econ, I really tried!). Sometimes, I have been slow to grasp. Sometimes, their pedagogy left something to be desired.

But when I say I have had the best teachers, I mean that I have learnt from some wonderful humans all my life. They came in to teach me a particular topic, in the formal classroom or as supervisors. But from each of them, I learnt how to be. Each one showed me a dimension of how to live. 

Sometimes these were concrete tips that I still use. How to construct evaluation in a course so you create a learning path. How to continue to work (especially on a paper) even when you are blocked. The importance of legible fonts in a submission (sorry, sorry, sorry!). How to hem so neatly you can barely see. Really, the sum total of whatever I know, I know because of my teachers. 

I treasure too the example of the professor would quote Moliere's Sganarelle in the middle of a discussion on realism in international relations. I treasure the professor whose week included a jazz gig. I treasure the school teacher who turned every poem into a song and the one who had an anthem for her maths class--which made us smile but also ready to learn. I treasure the brilliant mind of my dissertation advisor that would find PhD topics in the strangest places--the limitless imagination and the creative play. (We read a book on play in our epistemology class but sadly, we did not play at all.) I treasure the years in a teaching-first college that freed me of the need to control my class (age and experience also help).

Most of my teachers have had this in common--they have been good, caring people. They have not needed to control their students' choices. They have been content to free us to grow while being present during our journeys. They have been secure humans--this is so rare, so rare, in education! 

I have noticed that my favourite conversations now are about teaching. 

This is because I treasure the gift of being in a classroom more than I can express. 

I played 'school-school' all through childhood. In fact, you might say, I am notorious for having schooled many generations of visitors to our home. Greatgrandparents, great-aunts, great-uncles, uncles, aunts, cousins--many, many are graduates of my school. My family will tell you that as my great-grandfather lay dying, I taught my great-uncle (his son) arithmetic on the lawns. I was four, he was a senior civil engineer. He was also my most difficult student. He got all his sums wrong (deliberately, indulgently). I was so concerned about his education that for months I sent him postcards with homework that he returned with mistakes! He may have been the student I have loved most in my life. 

As a teenager, I wrote the prospectus of a school I was going to start with all the elements I loved from schools in story-books (about schools). I made sure to bring in my other blessing--my cousins--by giving them all jobs and building rooms for them in campus plans I would love to draw up (in my next life, I will be an architect and in this, I enjoy admiring my architect friend's projects). 

I have tutored (badly) and I have run peace education projects on my own before I really knew the term. 

The linear path out of a PhD was to a teaching job. I taught through graduate school and four years after that but then for more than a decade, the teaching I got to do was repetitive training workshops and some mentoring of interns. 

The peace education programme at the NGO is for me the heart of my NGO--my heart too. We do other things and we are known for other things but this is the centre-point in my vision. In the years in which we imagined it as a classroom and school-centred programme, I got to talk teaching with my Montessori teacher cousin who is a classroom rockstar--sure-footed in what she wants to teach and secure enough to also become a student. I loved this. I still love talking teaching with her though she has moved on from our project (she is still a teacher).

The gift of being in a classroom has returned to my life in bits and pieces. I have come back to regular teaching, enriched by every life experience. I channel every good teacher I ever had into my work and hope to be somewhat as effective. 

Again and again, when I am preparing or when I am in the classroom, I think: This is what they mean by "labour of love." To do something you love. To do something you can do with love. To do something that fills your space with warmth and affection. That is something I have learned from my students who ultimately are the best teachers you will ever have. 

I started writing this post thinking that I love teaching and talking about teaching but I never blog about it. Then I thought of my wonderful teachers and this is where the post has meandered. It is guru dakshina and it is also gratitude that I get to be a lifelong learner in the satsang of my students. It is a prayer that the gift that has taken its time to reach me, stays with me for a while.