The Teacher and the Taught

Recent happenings in the Mechanical Department at NIT Hamirpur haven't been too pretty (read: the 3 hours of Dynamics of Machinery finals). I wouldn't like to go very deep into the intricacies of the whole matter for privacy's sake, but it is a larger habit at hand that concerns me as a student.

A vast majority of students treat their Profs as enemies. In the early days, I didn't quite subscribe to that train of thought. The education system posed certain demands and teachers were mere messengers executing the task at hand. But what I failed to recognise then was that even this execution was an art form; which is why someone like Dr. Anoop Kumar, Dean, Students' Welfare and Alumni Affairs was so looked up to by his students while some lesser mortals couldn't be cared for any lesser.

Of all the ingredients that makes up one's character, one feature that clearly separates the wheat from the chaff is the ability to think from the other person's shoes. A teacher shouts at a student for being 2 minutes late to class. Question: How many times in the Teacher's student career did he enter his class on time? Teachers talk of copying in examinations as if it were a sinful act of crime. Now, by no means am I suggesting they advocate copying, My argument is very simply that the same people who have been through what we are going through react to similar situations in a way that is totally detached. This is the same way every adolescent thinks that his/her parents were never adolescents. The connection is simply missing. I'm forced to believe that these 'people' who teach me today were never really students at any point of time in their lives. Somehow, they came into this world with a sash that said 'Teacher'.

It is here again that I go into my bag of thoughts and pull out what Dr. Anoop once said, that any position must be treated as position of responsibility, and not as a position of power. Our not-so-democratic education system has still kept the teacher on a higher pedestal of power than the student. And it is a shame to see some people thriving off this power, or simply put, living off the virtue of the students' weakness. Who is teaching and who is learning? Maybe some role reversal could help.