They say charity starts from home and I would like to start by mentioning that I belong to a family of teachers. My parents were teachers who taught abroad, my grandmother was a teacher and my grandfather was the Principal of one of the oldest schools in Gurgaon. It goes without saying that when my daughters passed out of school and college one of the career options before them was, obviously teaching. However, while my eldest did her B.Ed. the younger one was adamant about doing her L.L.B., a breakaway from the family tradition! You must be wondering about the elder one? Well, she decided not to get into teaching at all, that too in spite of her professional qualification, and now she is working with a startup dealing with online education and she is a business development professional!
When I ask some of my students if they would like to become teachers one day, their reply is instant 'No!' One wonders why fewer and fewer youth want to take up teaching as a profession. Today, thanks to the Covid-19 Pandemic and the concurrent online teaching platforms, teachers are taking more of their work home than they used to. Children of parents who are teachers see their parents work till late hours sending invites for the next day's online classes, or even prepping lesson plans activities, entry tickets and exit tickets for the next day's class. They see how hard their parents are working and thus they don't really want to be like their parents. Students who attend school for hybrid classes see their teachers carrying a laptop, an assortment of cables, textbooks, diaries running from one class to another, from one floor to another just so that they can reach their classes on time, in order to connect their devices to the internet or LAN cable, login to the Zoom Meeting, start the projector and then cater to the needs of the students who are attending classes physically and those who are online. It is indeed an act that only the most talented and skilled jugglers can manage.
Students can see how hard their teachers are working and when they think about their future careers, they are daunted by the effort put in by their teachers. The same happens to the be case with parents whose children might be attending classes offline and online. Even they have begun to respect the effort made by the teacher's of their children. Unfortunately, teaching has become more of an act of walking a tight rope or juggling a few balls in the air than a so called act of 'enlightening' or even facilitating learning. Teachers have become data entry operators, audit clerks, counsellors, anything apart from what they have been trained for. The requirement for the profession of teaching has been split between being an I.T. expert on the one hand and being a subject expert. It is not surprising, therefore to see how many teachers fall victim to burnout or stress-related complications.
In the days to come we are going to see fewer and fewer young people opting to become teachers. Discerning people would like avoid the stress, fatigue and hard work that marks one of the oldest professions in the world. One sees fewer and fewer men taking up the profession as other more lucrative options have opened up that offer less stress. In a country like India, for talented people who appear for Civil Services Exams with the hope of become an IAS officer, the teaching profession becomes the last option if they don't succeed. A good many years go into the preparation for entrance exams for Civil Services and if they don't get through then most of them have already grown quite old.
The Covid-19 pandemic has had its toll on teachers, what with the uncertainty of what the future holds accompanied by the psychological impact of virtual learning platforms that in a way seem to have turned the whole profession into a rather mechanical and unemotional one. The lack of emotional connect with students, having to listen to the tinny voices coming from laptops, the stress of having to cope with new LMS/ERP platforms every now and then, power failures, poor internet bandwidth problems, servers that keep flashing "internal server error", all of them have made teaching a task rather than a joy. The unfortunate advent of the Pandemic has given us a picture of the future of teaching, and it is not very pleasant. The whole educational process was meant to promote joyful learning, experiential learning, learning through expeditions and learning by doing.
The teachers of tomorrow will have to be multitaskers, people who have to balance subject expertise with a very sound knowledge of how to use Internet Technology. This in itself will add to the burden that a teacher will have to shoulder. Many private schools during the Pandemic have been forced to layoff teachers due to lack of funds. Parents have found it hard to pay there children's school fees because they themselves have been without jobs. Lack of funds, layoffs, extended workhours, increasing work-life balance problems, lack of 'me time' and distractions caused by the need to focus on IT skills, pressure on delivering products on virtual platforms have all robbed teaching of its sheen.
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