Couple of hours back I opened my student tracker, just sat back and started mulling over how each of my kids have changed over the past few months. As I went through the list reading each of the kids names, images of the kid kept flashing in and out of my mind and most of them, so turned out to be of those moments when they were being ecstatic or really happy. This made me wonder how we as humans tend to capture/remember only the positives or the cheerful part in our relationships. But as a teacher, am I not failing my kids in not noticing their negative behaviour and working to get them back to their normal self? Am I doing justice to them by not stopping what I’m doing and not taking that extra time to pay attention to that minuscule behavioral change? How many times have I swept a behavioral change under the blanket and continued with my class/session? How many times have I ‘neglected’ a kid in the rush to finish off a topic/objective?
Sadly in retrospect I seem to recollect more than one occasions where I’ve failed noticing/paying heed to the change. This could probably be one of those reasons why a particular kid did not perform well in a particular objective; a reason why a particular kid did not receive me with the same enthusiasm as he otherwise would have and this is something I’m really beginning to appreciate in this role as a teacher. Every moment in the classroom you end up dealing with the emotions of 46 kids out there. Human to human interaction is the utmost priority. When I go back to my classroom in twenty days for the second term, this is one thing that I have to keep in mind always.
Talking by numbers, my kids have progressed from a class average of 25% to 56% in Math, from 17% to 59% in Grammar and from 28%[-0.1 Grade] to 85%[1.5 Grade] in RC. Thats some significant progress that the class has made. But again, the class average does not necessarily represent the overall growth of the classroom. There still are kids like – Sarfaraz, Nabil, Aditya More, Meghana and Yash Pawar who need to make tremendous progress if they have to be on par with the other kids. I guess that is where the main challenge lies.
Today, I visualize my classroom as a circular board resting on a pivot. I being the pivot and the circular board, a playground where my 46 little ones decide the dynamics of the classroom from inside. My responsibility is to maintain the equilibrium and I need to be extremely flexible so as to adjust and re-position to the external stimuli and the dynamics created by my kids so that the whole system remains in equilibrium always. The next fortnight I guess is all about figuring out how to maintain that equilibrium, about how I push myself to my limits of being flexible and making that transformation something sustainable…