Dynamics of Teacher - Student Relationship | Phonics and Grammar classes in Ahmedabad

Dynamic of a teacher and students in a modern-day classroom setting

Aug 08, 2022

Having studied in a school and several tuition classes for almost fifteen years, I now realise that what I witnessed was one side of a large infrastructure. A teacher teaching a group of students is something that can be traced back to the far past. Everything we know today is because someone chose to teach what they found crucial and beautiful to someone else. Even in a strictly Indian context, it can be traced back to the traditional teachings of elements like Indian Religions, Mathematics and Logic at early Hindu and Buddhist centres of learning, like Takshashila and Nalanda.

If we try to place this practice in a contemporary sense, we can see the modernisation of the values of transactions involved in that. For example, English, despite being a coloniser’s tongue, has been introduced as an Indian language and thus has fit into the Indian subcontinent accordingly.

Zooming in, a classroom setting can be observed. What happens in this setting is a silent yet effective successor of the Indian teaching system of Gurukul. The teacher is present there and the students come to that specified place to learn, resembling the gurukul model.

Students, when small, don’t realise how difficult it is for a teacher to look after a class full of students and on the other hand, the teachers too don’t understand how tender and impressionable the young minds are. Usually, there is a generation gap, but these gaps are closing in now. As these gaps blur out, there is a gradual building of trust between them, and both, the teacher and the students, start seeing each other for who they are, realness climbs in the room and the teaching enhances, for both of them know each other better now.

All the students want teachers like Aamir Khan from ‘Taare Zameen Par’ or John Keatings from ‘Dead Poets Society. To have such deep levels of trust and affection in a classroom is every teacher’s dream as well, however, one must now forget that it is a deeply volatile environment for students, that needs to be organised and handled gently and carefully.

When both the parties, the teacher and the student, lie on different drives of lives, there must be a middle ground for them to meet, and that is a classroom. It involves a gradual development of trust, friendship, rationality and other aspects as well. In a tutions setting, the students feel freer than they do in class and that helps in creating a more suitable or rather free environment to learn in. In such situations, the time of a certain class is comparatively less, and so teachers have to have a certain strictness to complete the syllabi constructively.

In some circumstances, what gets lost is the fact that all must understand that everyone is humane underneath these roles of students and teachers, and thus must treat each other with nothing but kindness. The outcome of such roles is everyone learning how to build respectful/honest relationships in life.

I remember my teachers as I write this, and realise that along with parents, one remembers his/her/their teachers as they grow up and climb beautiful milestones.