GUESS WHO’RE THE NEW BULLIES ON THE BLOCK IN THE EASTERN BELT! — OR HAVE THEY TAKEN OVER THE WEST TOO!?
You’ve got it wrong if you thought they were a fresh batch of online drug peddlers, AI-backed Jihadis, newer social-media pretenders, or just-arrived obscure cyber-criminals lurking to get your credit card details!
Because I turned out wrong too guessing much the same when Wendy shot the question at me last Friday!
Welcome to the world post-Corona, and to the new bullies on the block today, at least in the field of Education — meet the proud and vigilant online fee-paying parents of countless kids over the globe who now study from home!
Yes, the scene, after March 2020, has changed, and forever. And the new bullies on the block today bully those that thought could never be bullied only because the latter called the shots in the sphere they dominated, and right from the history of Education — our dear teachers.
Indeed, myriad untold tales have passed through the years when parents headed to their children’s schools to attend the periodical parent-teacher meetings, apprehension borne in their hearts regarding what they would hear about their wards, to only return home teary-eyed and depressed owing to unsavory news of all sorts about the latter piled onto them by an irritated, stressed-out bunch of you-know-who.
Wendy, a patient undergoing my treatment, had called last Friday to submit her fortnightly progress report on the status of her ongoing health. She was doing good, she said, and was happy with the way her body had been responding to the Nature-Cure based health protocol I’d suggested for her to follow. However, if there was a thing that had upset her which she feared would tell on her health, it was the way things were shaping up concerning her children’s studies. Disturbed, she discussed the same.
She hadn’t had the slightest inkling, she confessed, about the third-grade quality of education her kids, in all these years, had received so far, and in a school that she and her husband had believed was one among the best in their locality. And she’d turned disillusioned after the school started their e-classrooms a month back, she revealed, because she was an unhappy, unfortunate witness to the real-time action that was going on every day in the desktop in her house, between the kids and their teachers.
When I asked her what seemed to be the problem, she questioned asking what wasn’t! She was mad at the system and listed her woes.
- There were basic spelling mistakes in every second sentence most teachers typed.
- Their pronunciation was deplorable, and a murder to the prime language the Central Board of Education in India had chosen — English.
- They spoke in harsh, unfriendly tones while teaching, and there was a lack of warmth toward the children.
- They conducted their e-classes sitting in rooms with unprofessional background settings, some with the family’s bedroom clothes hung on the wall behind them as they taught into the webcams while others had their kids & pets routinely move about the room even as the teachers spoke into the headsets!
All this had totally distressed Wendy as they were paying hefty annual sums for the children’s fees, and she questioned the very purpose of the charade before letting me know they were toying with the idea to home-school their kids, then looked for a suggestion from me.
I couldn’t disagree with her, for I’d recently been reading articles in the papers that reported teachers in India quitting e-classrooms owing to the pressure they were facing because parents were posting videos of their online classes on social media which bore testimony to her accusations!
I shared my thoughts with her on the subject, and I share them with my readers today.
What Wendy is seeing, sadly, is nothing new in India, a developing country with a population of 1.3 billion, and not unlike over a hundred other countries in the world falling in the bracket of ‘developing countries’, their count totaling a staggering 3.8 billion people out of a global population of 7.8 billion! Calculate the percentage.
In India, we have 22 different regional languages, or mother tongues, as officially recognized by the Govt (there are 19,498 unofficial ones, or sub-dialects) which comprise our “thinking” languages, but the language adopted by the Central Board of Schooling & Education is English.
The medium of teaching in India is English. They print the textbooks in English; I disregard the vernacular medium of schooling in the country which educates millions of children across the States, albeit teaches most subjects with their textbooks printed in “Semi-English”, or a mix of English and the concerned regional language, and with their teachers mainly conversing with the students and teaching in their local lingoes.
Let us get to the teachers teaching English in India. Indians speaking “Indian English” teach English in India, and native teachers belonging to each separate State, owing to their uniquely distinct regional lingoes, speak a variety of versions of, err, English.
The teacher who probably stood Number-1 among the entire Indian English teaching staff would, I’m certain, fall short in some aspect of the language or the other when compared with any regular high school English teacher in, say, London, the U.S., or any other country with English as its mainstream language.
Why? Because we think in our mother tongues. Simple.
Here, we have Bengali teachers from West Bengal teaching their subjects in Bong-lish, or a mix of Bengali & English, while Hindi teachers from Uttar Pradesh in the North stick to Hing-lish, or a mix of Hindi & English!
Next, the English that a South Indian speaks; I allude to those born and brought up in India (ignore the Indians having settled abroad, boasting citizenship statuses in their elected countries) will have a South Indian lilt to it while one will find the same language sounding far different when a Punjabi from Punjab converses in it. And so it is with people from each State, absolutely including our teachers, owing to their varied mother tongues!
A Bachelor of Education degree, a mandate in India if one wanted to become a teacher, cannot, I’m afraid, buy fluency in English, or bring respectable grasp over the language unless one wasn’t willing to put in the efforts to fine-tune themselves.
Putting in the efforts to think in the language one desires mastering can bring in proficiency in any language, and this to a considerable extent, mark, owing to the same not being our mother tongues.
That said, it wouldn’t be improper to admit the least we could do is take the trouble to rectify ourselves grammatically; again, to the extent we can; if only for the sake of a language that is someone else’s mother tongue, and one the Central Board of Education of India has chosen as its medium of instruction, be it a language alien to us until not two-and-a-half centuries back!
The bottom line?
Life, post-Corona, demands we move toward digital living, and none can do much to reverse this. The global education system has accepted the same, with teachers having begun their e-classrooms all over, many among them backing out of the race in the initial months notwithstanding!
It is clear parents working from home, also having moved toward digital or remote working, will definitely keep tabs on the e-classrooms happening in their homes, and well, those conducting the classes will have to pull their socks up if they did not desire checking themselves out as bungling English performers on YouTube or WhatsApp!
May the best applicants win. May the old-age hiring systems based on ‘castes’ that our politicians have brought in, if only to ensure of their vote banks, get obsolete. May those that exert their efforts to fine-tuning themselves in their elected fields win.
Reckon the time to have arrived for our beloved teachers to prove themselves to the ones they called the shots over for all along. Oh, did I hear someone say tables are but meant to be turned?
