#4 Teaching for Thousands?

[This blog is dedicated to many people, but the picture alongside is courtesy a post and comment on Facebook by Ninad Vengurlekar, one of my thinking buddies of yesteryear - not to mention the exquisite Bombil Fry at Gazale we enjoyed together.]

So, I am going to answer the question that was posed in the last blog, "Why did you give up teaching?"

Literally, thousands.

The first of many answers is the simplest - Money!  As the lady alongside exemplifies, even in the land of overflowing milk, honey and orange hairdos, the teacher is still one who is at the top of her class in what she does and close to the bottom of the economic pile when take-home salary arrives.

Yes, teaching was literally for thousands ... I willingly took up the profession in 1977 with a consolidated pay of Rs 350 a month in one of Calcutta's Premier Institutions.  I have the appointment letter to prove it too.

Things improved in a few months when I accidentally landed a job at St Xavier's, my alma mater.  That appointment letter is also a bit of a relic though I won't share the sum thereon.  The "scale of pay" depended not on what one was capable of, but on one's qualifications.  Hence a simple BA (Hons), BEd was entitled to a Grade which was close to the top but not quite the tens of thousands.  And the scale ensured that if you stayed in the profession long enough, say 20 years, you could eventually increase the number of digits before the comma to two.  For some strange reason I was never interested in chasing the stockpile, opening the shop, garnering the moolah or whatever the polite euphemisms were for "taking tuition" after school.  To be fair, I did for awhile -- many of those tuitions were free too.  But when a certain colleague demanded a "reciprocal arrangement" with students of my class, I dropped the idea like a ton of bricks.

Initially, I signed up for the Masters more to keep myself in study mode than for anything else. I was pulled into a hasty corner by a well meaning colleague and informed that I wouldn't get any extra pay since a Masters is equivalent to a Trained Graduate with Hons at the school level. Stupid me!  Here I was thinking of studying and doing well in an examination and they were not going to pay me more!  How unfair, I hear you cry.  But that is what this lady is saying back there.  Despite good qualifications, teachers are forced to run after all sorts of additional income - though I would stop short at selling blood - in order to live a decent life and raise a family.

Which brings me to another thought:  Is there a real economic reason why a large number of bachelors and spinsters populate the teaching profession?  Perish the thought!  Our good, selfless upbringing has taught us that Teaching is a Noble Vocation -- not a profession, not a well paid option but a "vocation" which means you should eat well, walk to school, and stay in the same place forever. Maybe stay unmarried by choice?

Thousands could mean more people

One of my friends, and later a mentor, asked me a question which I got to thinking about as late as 1993.  The question was, "If you continue teaching you will impact about 150 students a year.  If you took up working with adults, teachers too, you would impact several thousands through your interventions. Don't you think you should impact more students through their teachers?"  And so, I tentatively started taking a few workshops in the B Ed department. 

 My erstwhile Principal, Fr Andre Bruylants sj (RIP), organized sessions for me with other schools and soon I was taking regular workshops on teaching methods and teaching of maths.  Albeit for a small honorarium, but it pointed the way to better things.

Two and half thousand ... at your funeral?

My closest friend, Elphage Rozario, a dynamic and creative colleague with whom I spent several hours designing teaching activities, passed away in a tragic accident in 1995.  His funeral was massive -- an estimated 2500 people attended.  It was overwhelming.  Then one of my former students came up to me and asked why I wanted to continue teaching.  "Are you investing all this lifeblood in two and a half thousand people at your funeral?"   The shock hit me really hard.  It was unfair and hit at the root of everything our little group of dedicated educationists stood for.  It never left my mind.  I started questioning everything about the School (which is still the best in the city) and its administration.  

The following year I went to Goa alone -- Elphage would otherwise have accompanied me.  And there I met the life changer, my wife-to-be, Beatrix. 

Also a teacher, by the way, but far tougher than I was at the time.  She fought with me for spending all my waking hours in the service of the school, perhaps neglecting the family.  She enlisted the help of Fr Bruylants to talk sense to me and send me  home.  She had to sacrifice teaching to take care of our kids.  Years later she went back to teaching and last week she won yet another award for the Most Innovative Teacher - well deserved, no doubt.  Perhaps I will compose another blog on the powerhouse in the family.

2000 and the Millenials

I've got three of them, the millenials.  A girl and two boys.  Three other reasons I took the big decision to quit school teaching and move to corporate.  I wonder if there is another ulterior meaning to millenials? It seems to reflect the kind of fees I am paying to get them through a basic education.  Fortunately, I foresaw that - or it might have been Beatrix pushing me to do something about the finances at home when my second child was born.  We have been blessed with fantastic friends in all professions who made life really comfortable for us on my teaching salary.  

And then, one day, in discussion with Fr Bruylants, I decided to quit teaching on the 21st anniversary of starting -- a sort of coming-of-age!  Fr Bruylants insisted on my taking an unpaid sabbatical rather than resigning forthwith.  He said it would be a safety net if I ever decided to come back to teaching.  I never did.

I never left teaching

That's what I said.  I just moved over to a corporate employer who offered me about 4 times more than my last salary at the school.  In return for which I helped them design and run teacher training and student development programs across the country for the next 13 years.  The money went up and I was able to send my children to good schools without standing in line for concessions.  I am able to foresee that their futures are more than likely to be taken care of, at least financially.

So to answer the question posed, I left school teaching for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the ability to transform and metamorphose to professional life, learn new behaviour, and be accountable for my performance.  Something the teaching profession never really demanded in the good old days.

[Hope this answers the questions.  I am really open to answering any other questions you want to pose in the comments.  I will do it through the next or subsequent blogs.  Please do leave your comments and feedback and questions!]