The teacher gets to learn!

  9 years! A long time! A lot happened in this world, a lot happened in this life. The junior engineer who wrote the last blog has become a senior engineer (yeah, the same way chimps turned men with the flow of time). But this space remained still, without any change. And partly it was the change within me which caused that. I read more and realized I don’t write well. So I decided better to stick to reading than writing, at least in English. So what happened that nudged me back from the self-imposed exile? A ‘Secret Santa’ game at work.  The Santa was the intern for whom I am the mentor. Mentor! Strong word I still find it difficult to grapple with the word as referenced to me. I am not used to guiding people. The gift I received from Santa caught me spellbound for the amount of effort which went in to making it and the clarity of thought on what would make me happy as a person. And in addition, it had a letter which said I had been a good teacher all this while. To say I felt humbled by that, would be an understatement.

  On the way back home, I was thinking about teaching and how it influences the teacher and the student. Through my years of education, I have had good and bad teachers. And I know how the student thinks about a good teacher. The respect that you feel for someone who influenced you or taught you something in the right manner is something I as a student had perceived. It is something I have seen when my grandmother’s former students come visiting her. I knew exactly how the student felt like. But I never understood how the teacher felt, until today. And today I got a glimpse of what the teacher felt like. So this blog is about the teacher and what the teacher felt.

  I always viewed student-teacher transaction (not in a formal classroom sense, but more in the sense of an interaction where one person explains and the other absorbs the information) as a one-way flow when it comes to learning outcomes. The person who absorbs information benefits from it, the person who explained has a feel good factor. But how wrong I was! Working with the intern I realized how it provided clarity to my own understanding of something. I would explain a concept or how some code worked and then I kind of see how it cemented my understanding of the same. In that process, in my mind, I would have filled up some areas of my understanding which were hazy or not really thought upon. At times I could not answer some questions and would go about learning new things myself. And then, there was the aspect of realizing how vastly different a person who has background knowledge of something, and one who doesn’t, think about it. I would have asked the intern to do something and then assumed she would be able to easily do it. But then she would come to me with some question which I thought was trivial. And then it hits me that what I thought was trivial was not trivial to the intern, for she had not spent 4 years on it, the way I had. It was easy for me to forget that fact and consider myself superior. But what I might interpret as my superiority in knowledge was actually my stupidity. I was foolish to think that I had given the right direction. I had not! I understood that I should get a feel of how much the other person knows and find the correct starting point before providing instructions.

  The first lesson I had passed on to the intern was to not address anyone by ‘Sir’ as we go by first names at work. Right out of college you find it difficult. I did address seniors ‘Sir’ till someone taught me not to. So what I learned from my teachers in my work-life, and thought was a good lesson, I passed on to the mentee. Respect need not be linked to what you refer a person as is what I learned. I have a lot of respect for many people whom I address by name here. She did follow my advice and I was happy about it. And then, in the letter she addressed me as Sir and she explained why she was doing so. And that was another learning for the teacher. The teacher enjoyed the respectful irreverence! I think the teacher would want the student to learn what was taught but should be happy to see the student weighing in on the teaching and being ready to let go of the lesson, if that was a needed step.

  In all, the process has been a refreshing one for me. I realized how much one benefits by trying to pass on things which he thinks he knows. I realized how the teacher felt. As I roughly read my previous posts here, I realized how my language has evolved, how I as a person has evolved. All this triggered by the kind words from someone who considered herself the student. I wonder; who was the teacher, who was the student?! I fail to see a line. And if I unwillingly consider myself the teacher, I can only say, “The teacher gets to learn!”