Created On : 2020-07-09 12:45:05
Inline with online classes…
In line with online classes…
When I was in Class 7, I had to play the role of a music teacher to a parrot in the play ‘Panjara Shaale’. As the play would have multiple shows in three cities in North Karnataka, the director, Late Jayatheertha Joshi asked me to be ready with my lines and acting along with the song I had to render. My father asked me to practise in front of the mirror.
That was my first experience of expressing myself with no one around me! The experience was strange and rather unique.
After more than four decades, it feels like déjà vu…..
What makes online teaching different from offline teaching?
- Teaching to an empty room with your students sitting in remote areas is rather mechanical.
- I have no clue whether a student is actually watching my class or has logged in and watching the latest TV series on another tab!
- I am too conscious to the fact that I must not make any errors anywhere! If I write the wrong date on a blackboard or calculate the root of 16 as 8, my students are going to be immediately correcting me; in a physical classroom. But, when I’m online, I feel teacher-less myself!
- And, most importantly…..teaching is not a solitary action. It is a dynamic activity that cannot be robotic; that cannot be isolated; that cannot be a fixed recipe. Teaching evolves, customises and develops as the class proceeds.
Me, as a grandmother, have lost most of my brain plasticity. I cannot easily adapt to a childless teaching room/studio; even though I know I’m delivering a good lesson online. I miss my students a lot. I miss my own PJs I used to crack spontaneously in class; I miss the lively chatter from students; I miss entering the class and seeing the smiling faces just closing their lunch boxes ready for the next class; I miss giving up a class voluntarily because I want to play Hangman or Geometric Pictionary.
The kids I teach are 17 year olds. They are excellent adapters. They have good brain plasticity that allows them to adapt well to changing environments. After online classes have become the norm since March, many students and parents have shared the good news that students have become more disciplined than they were before – like sticking to a routine of learning online, making notes, trying to work out difficult questions on their own and approaching the teacher only when really necessary; making time to catch up on general reading; trying their hand at maybe learning the quickest and finest way of chopping vegetables; trying pencil sketching, etc.
But, there are also a bigger group of students who haven’t realised that they too can adapt. They spend too much time worrying about circumstances that they have no control over; they waste precious energy on cribbing about these difficult times; they have forgotten that what’s happening w.r.t the pandemic will pass; they have forgotten that if they think calmly they can make tremendous use of the present lockdown.
I have been teaching a lot online and so has every colleague of mine. I have been teaching in greater detail through online classes and so is every colleague of mine. In the pursuit of delivering high standard classes to our students, we, as teachers, have lost a lot in terms of the enriching interaction we enjoyed before a virus took over the globe. When I conclude every online class, my brain knows I have taught well; but my brain also knows that the satisfaction isn’t there.
So, in short; I, a teacher, would like to say to a mutant virus…. ‘I hope you know you can exist without actually existing. Stay as a crystal in some bottle and don’t get out ever. I need my students to complete me’.
Prof. Lakshmi Murthy,
Program Head – Medical Excel & NEET Plus
