A very important aspect and skill of becoming a good teacher is the ability of a teacher to connect the child to the mind of the teacher. And once the child’s mind is connected to the teacher’s mind, it is like a firewood lighting a fire. The mind of the child gets ignited. And once the mind of the child is ignited, it sustains the fire and makes it a raging fire.
This is where the teaching skill becomes very important. Teachers are as good as social leaders. When you listen to some of the political leaders you get attracted to the speech automatically. Have you heard the speeches of Mr. Obama, the former president of America and the late Kerala State Chief Minister E.K Nayanar? The mind gets connected to their minds. You get engaged in their thoughts.
What happens is your mind gets excited on a thought process. And you start exploring it. And what the speaker does throughout the speech is that he connects the mind to his thoughts further. As the speech ends, you are so happy that you don’t feel bored unlike the boring lectures in classrooms. As the speech finishes, by a political leader, you feel energetic, excited, and become aware.
One of the goals of teaching is building a higher awareness. Awareness comes through connecting our minds to the real world or the real environment. The real environment includes other human beings like us, the animals, the plants, the micro-organisms. So, the mind gets ignited as soon as we learn a method to connect to them. If you can’t connect to other minds you cannot be anything. The success of a teacher is in igniting the mind, connecting to an angle of thought, and finally ending up building a new awareness. This is what is required through learning. However, the remains: How to connect?
How does a mother connect her mind with her purpose to the child? Is she ordering, ‘come eat food?’ Maybe out of fear one time. Have you ever seen what the mother does so that the child will eat? Just by expressing the mind through words of love, the child will come and eat. But, what can make a child continue with the eating habit without the mother? What can make the child continue to do activities without the mother? That’s where the mother succeeds. Similar to the mother, a teacher succeeds only when the student learns on his/her own.
A character shown by the child in a public place is exactly what it imbibed from the parents. When a child behaves extremely well in a public place with friends, with relatives or unknown people, if he/she shows courage the child is admired; and if the child speaks good language then the child is appreciated. How do parents impart good qualities into the mind of a child? What was the technique used?
For sure you know that the answer is experience. What one can experience is only the mind and anything that cannot be experienced will be rejected. How does the experience come? Mostly through eyes, ears, taste, smell and touch. By eye contact because your eyes are your doors to experience, your ears are your doors to connect and get an experience, your ears because if there were no ears you would not be able to enjoy a good song, by nose to experience good smell, by your tongue to experience good taste, and by skin to experience a good feel. The mind can be connected only by these five senses. Like the mother, like the father, like the members of the family; the teacher exactly knows how to connect to the child through the senses. That’s like putting firewood to the fire, and you blow air. Connect it. The moment the fire connects to the firewood, you wouldn’t have to blow again. The fire gets bigger. That’s the process of the mind. When the mind gets an experience, the next is to ignite the fire of thinking through exploring.
What does the teacher have to do at this stage? Keep on speaking? As, the fire is already lit, you don’t have to blow anymore air. Then what do you do? Control the fire, modify its direction in such a way that the vessel on top gets heat. It conducts heat, it cooks food. According to the requirement the efficiency is modified and controlled. This is exactly what a teacher needs to do – connect the mind to guide the fire of thinking.
Thinking is nothing but exploring. How should that exploration go in a positive way? Create an awareness in the child for a better learning outcome.
What’s required of a teacher? It is the formative way of teaching. What’s formative way of teaching? What did the mother do with the child when food was served? The mother added everything that the child likes and the mother feeds only when the child is hungry. And, when the child starts tasting, the mother brings different varieties of food to make it tastier for the child to eat more. She will narrate a number of stories while feeding the child. The mother will ask a number of questions to the child. For instance, when the child eats an egg, the mother will ask who lays eggs and the child learns that it is a hen. Thus, the mother creates a learning environment and uses formative questions. And, each question directs the thinking of the child to think more and to build awareness. If a teacher does not know how to use an environment and formative ways of challenging and questioning the child, that fire will never ignite. The child would want to run away from the classroom.
A mother knows that all her children have different choices and so she serves her children different dishes. If one child likes ghee and payasam, the other child will like salty food and yet another will like mutton and chicken with chilly. So is the learning outcome in a classroom. Keeping the awareness at the same point, the outcomes will be different. If a teacher is going to have the same outcome for her teaching, the teacher will not succeed. Because human nature is like that.
It is impossible to draw the same outcome. Unfortunately, some curriculum says that the learning outcome has to be measured in a summative examination and students who score above 90 are rated as outstanding. I don’t agree with the grading system. The learning outcome should be subjected to the inner talent of a child. So, a good teacher should have the ability to create awareness in his/her students through formative questioning which will help develop the child to think and explore.
