Those who dare to teach

Teaching has always been considered an honourable profession; so much so that until recently it was a profession where the compensation was honour only and not monetary at all.

This fortunately has been remedied, so teachers can concentrate at the job in hand without worrying about how to keep the home fires burning.

As a teacher in India and Canada I learned some valuable lessons.  The most important lesson I learned in Canada was that, “A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary,” as Thomas Caruthers said.

I was teaching in a school which was for adults and followed the model of self-paced independent study.  I prided myself on being the person with the best Mathematics knowledge and the “go to” teacher for Mathematics problems.

Then one day I noticed a student approaching another teacher, my friend Andie (name changed.) “Oh no! She’s not familiar with XIIth Standard Math.  Maybe I should offer to help out,” I thought; but decided to let her try.  Imagine my surprise when Andie calmly told the student, “I don’t know how to solve this problem.  Why don’t we both try and find out how to do it?”  Then methodically both of them went through the previous theory and ended up solving the problem!  I could just see the glow of triumph on the student’s face when Andie said, “Well, you did know how to solve the problem didn’t you?”

I think more than that student this was a learning experience for me.  I learned the value of saying “I don’t know.  Let’s find out.”  I also learned that “The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatises, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.”

Some of my readings taught me that there are right ways and wrong ways to mark exam papers.  A Nobel Laureate and professor at MIT, Daniel Kahneman, once noted that he observed what he terms as halo effect in his marking.

He saw that when he marked students’ exam papers in the conventional way i.e. all the answers of one student then all the answers of the next student and so on there was certain homogeneity in each paper.  He found that the mark for the first answer influenced the marks for the subsequent answers! Thus, if a student’s first answer was strong, and subsequent answer weak the student still got a good grade for the weak answer! The converse was also true.

This dedicated professor has corrected himself by evaluating the answers in the following way.  He grades the first answer for each of the students and writes the mark on the last page where he cannot see it and won’t influence him when he grades subsequent answers.  He then grades the second answer of each student and notes it down in the last page and proceeds till he has graded all the answers in all the papers.  This way he ensures that the “halo effect” or its converse does not play a role in the marking.
We may not all have the time to follow this rigorous routine; however, we can at least be aware of this possibility and try to be as impartial as possible in our grading.

Another area where we are all deficient is in encouraging students to ask questions. 

Quite often we see students who keep asking questions as troublemakers.  It is these students and their curiosity which will keep research at the forefront.  Obviously our need to complete the curriculum is the cause of our irritation when students ask questions but surely we can allocate say five minutes at the beginning of each class for questions and open discussion?

The main failing we are all guilty of is depending on “notes” that we have from days of yore rather than updating our knowledge.  John Cotton Dana perhaps summed up our duty in these words — “Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.”