To revered teachers
Ever heard of teachers who hate questions? Keep your mouth shut and listen. They glare if you raise a point. Persist, and face a counter-questioning barrage to teach you a much-needed lesson. Behave like a good kid and take notes and pretend you understand. When exams come, I’ll ask questions from these notes, so just cram them and throw up on the exam book. I’ll give you good grades. I’ll save you intellectual trouble. You’ll help me save face and useless effort, since you are a useless piece of s*** anyways.
Thanks for your sincere participation in the farce.
I was browsing through Jhajee’s blog, and came across this piece on his experience in grad school in the US. I agree with most of it. Indian enginnering education is mostly a mess. If students are doing well, its probably because they are smart, not because of their teachers efforts or contribution.
I have been taking 2 classes at MIT this semester. I have serious homework every week, which often makes me tense, but ends up making me learn a good deal and revise it. There is no satirical remark when a teacher finds you don’t know something that is a prerequisite to the course. They either explain it, or give a pointer to some work that’ll help understand it. Sometimes, they just suggest you should take a more basic course and then come back to the current one. No satire. No mockery.
I have experienced firsthand, and seen countless others face abject humiliation from teachers in India. If you complain, you are rudely reminded that its all for your own good and you could have avoided all this by knowing what you are supposed to know. You should be ashamed of yourself, one is told. You are just wasting your parents money by attending school here. What happened to all the interest and enthusiasm that made you clear whatever competitive exam landed you here in the first place. Oh the quality of students, it keeps going down every year. The previous batches were so good.
And thus the student is traumatised, while the teacher abrogates his responsibility. And once such an event happens, you are labelled. The incident is deeply embedded in the teachers mind, so everytime you make a mistake, you are reminded of your ‘misdeeds’. See this creature, the teacher tells his colleague, he is wasted.
Satire, sarcasm, irony, mockery, blatant insult, backbiting – tools I have seen some of my ‘respeced’ Gurujis employ in their noble quest to educate the next generation. Their conscience is clear; spare the stick and spoil the child. Since you can’t literally cane the student, make an honest attempt at verbal assault.
The teacher is shameless. Proves time and again his superficial knowledge, which is obvious to students anyway. Goes on to cast aspersions on the student’s character, background, and personality. Knowingly whispers to colleagues all the fatal traits he had seen in the student the very first time they met. Dude, at least speak low so the student doesn’t overhear you.
What kind of estimation would you have for such teachers? Calling them a disgrace is an understatement. They destroy students’ self-confidence, help their morales reach the lowest point in their lives, and discredit the teaching profession. I have known teachers who are fiercely jealous of their students’ successes and spew venom about them. They expect to and hope you will fail; they predict it loudly. If you go on and succeed, they brazenly proclaim you got things done through the back door.
Wasn’t there a low point beyond which you couldn’t dip?
If you are a teacher, and identify yourself with the characters I have described above, I really don’t know what to say to you. You know what to do though; it’s never too late.
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