Transcriber: Emilie Hughes Reviewer: Keira White
Hi, I’ve been teaching psychology as an assistant professor
for around five years in India, but my real interest to teaching began
as a 6th grade student when I was 10 years old,
while I was a student at a boarding school called St. Paul School in Darjeeling.
Just to give you some context, St. Paul’s is almost 200 years old,
and for every new visitor who walks into the school,
they feel like they’re at Hogwarts because the teachers are all
walking in suits and they have their academic gowns,
the buildings are built out of massive stones,
and the roofing is all picketed.
It also has a massive, sprawling campus.
You might have seen the school if you watch Bollywood movies
such as Main Hoon Na or Barfi, both of which have been partly shot there.
Now in a boarding school,
generally the concept of taking tuitions doesn’t exist.
So the students depend on one another in order to advance their learning
during the self study hours,
or what we in school used to call as the prep time.
This is the classic application of Vygotsky’s concept
of the More Knowledgeable Other, also referred to as MKO.
And during the exam week I was one of the many MKOs.
For seven years in school,
I taught every subject possible, with the exception of Hindi,
which I was abysmally bad at.
I taught math, I taught geography, physics, accountancy,
economics, and even literature.
And literature is something I don’t understand to this date.
But having taught it,
I feel that all of this experience that I had in school for those seven years
is invaluable to me in terms of the academician and the teacher
that I am today.
All of this has contributed greatly to me being able to teach competently.
And after five years of teaching,
I also must admit that teaching inside the classroom is probably
the easiest aspect of being a teacher because there are so many other nuanced
and subtle facets that go into teaching.
And I was to discover this truth quite quickly actually
because I was fresh out of Masters when I got my first job.
It had been just a month between the transition
from a master’s graduate to an assistant professor.
And on my first day I walked into this class full of enthusiasm
and idealism of wanting to make a change and, you know, change the world.
And in the first 10 minutes, I was met with the unkind realisation
that this is not as rosy as I thought it would be.
Not because teaching is not great,
but because there are other facets inside the classroom.
Just give you an instance:
On that first day, I was turned around to the blackboard
and drawing the structure of personality
in the shape of an iceberg, given by Freud,
and I heard a boy snigger to his friend and verbally direct an abuse at me.
It was meant to be a whisper,
a quiet giggle that you do between your friends,
but as happens often, they murmured a little too loudly,
and in this case for that student, unfortunately,
everybody in class heard it, including me.
And now I was on the spot because I had to react.
I felt like an eternity was passing between me turning around
and talking to my students, but which is just actually a fraction of a second.
And in this time, my mind went through a cascade of scenarios
of my time as a student, which was a month ago.
There were moments of disrespect that took place inside a classroom
that I was reliving
and the cruel realisation that now I was on the other side.
But thankfully for me, my experiences in boarding school had prepared me
for this event because there was an extraordinary event that took place
in school when I was in the 11th standard.
When I was in the 11th standard,
a friend of mine was suspended by the school authorities
because he lost his temper and hit another student.
Something like that is not acceptable.
Therefore, the director passed the judgment of suspension.
After passing that judgment, he got up from his chair,
walked to my friend and just hugged him.
They hugged for, I think, a good ten minutes,
and both of them were crying by the end of it.
And the director told my friend, “I know you lost your temper,
and I know you are full of remorse for what happened,
but I know that you will come out of this better and more in control,
and that makes me happy for you.
This suspension is just a blip in your journey.
Do not let it define you.
I know you will make me a proud teacher one day,
so just go and come back a better person.”
This was the kind of thing that inspired me,
that would inspire anybody,
and probably has played a great role in me becoming a teacher
and wanting to inspire my students to do better than they are.
Unfortunately for me or rather fortunately on that first day I was faced
with a similar situation where I was abused by a student.
He didn’t mean to abuse me directly.
It was supposed to be a passing phrase, I think,
but I heard it and I had two options in front of me.
One, to take him to the principal, scold him, get him suspended
or to follow the lead of my director.
I chose the latter and I think I would always continue to choose the latter.
I looked at my student and said: “Why did you feel the need to abuse me?”
And he said: “Sir, I didn’t abuse you.”
I said, “Everybody heard it, and I’m not going to punish you for this.
I’m not even angry at you because you abusing me
doesn’t mean I have to take it personally.
I don’t need to feel disrespected.
All I want is for you to grow out of this,
so maybe you can think of a reason why you felt
the need to abuse me instead of, you know, denying the charge.”
And then he just began looking down, which is sort of accepting his mistake.
And I said it was a mistake.
I understand it was a mistake and it was meant to be a whisper,
it came out a little too loudly, and here we are, I’m on the spot.
But I want you to take this as an opportunity to introspect.
Think of why you found it necessary to abuse a stranger,
especially since this is the first time you and I have met.
But anyway, now it’s your choice,
you can go to the washroom, wash your face, come back and sit down,
or you can choose to sit out for this one hour and come back next week.
We have work to do, we have things to learn.
And that was that, the matter was over, I had dealt with it.
But when I reached home that day,
I felt utterly incompetent because I had walked into a classroom
thinking I will educate people and I will make a difference in the world.
I was forewarned, quite rightly, by some of my teachers
saying that it won’t be easy and sometimes students might act smart,
but nobody told me that something could be this extreme.
Nobody told me that you might face something like this.
But that made me think of something else altogether.
Why was I not trained for this? Why wasn't I prepared for it?
I knew how to teach, but why wasn’t I prepared for anything else?
Why was I not required to complete a certification program to teach?
And as time passed, I began to realize that there is more to this profession
in terms of building courses,
developing assignments,
having evaluation rubrics,
all of which is very scientifically created and researched,
and yet we do not have proper certifications, qualifications to teach.
I was even building an entire Master’s program for a university
with my colleagues, with zero training on the methodology.
All the years I’ve spoken to enough first-time faculties to know
that they share similar trepidations.
And what makes it worse is that this isn’t limited to India.
This is true for most places in the world where people become lecturers
in higher education institutions.
They have a Ph.D. and they have some experience as teaching assistants,
and then they’re expected to do a great job inside a classroom.
They do have experience in learning, no doubt about it,
but where is the theoretical foundation that’s required?
Why isn't it necessary for people who are being trusted to educate young people
to have one simple one-year degree in education?
In India, to teach in high school you need a B.Ed,
but in higher education you don’t even need a PhD.
You need to give one exam that is net,
which has five questions about teaching aptitude out of 150 questions.
If you pass that hurrah, congratulations, you’re competent to be an educator,
and this feeling of incompetency,
I reacted in the best way that I could.
I delved into literature on education,
teaching and learning and student engagement.
And as I read more about them,
I began to see the wisdom of the ways I was educated back at St. Paul’s.
I’m sure the 200 years of history played a massive role
in the development of traditions that helped to educate us
in multiple ways, especially outside the classroom.
Things like positive teacher student relationships are always encouraged.
They knew that this sort of relationship builds affinity,
and a continuous interest in the students’ life
would predispose them to be attentive in class.
And if they do it just because they don’t want to disappoint you,
that’s good enough.
At St. Paul’s, we could discuss our teenage issues with our teachers.
The teachers worked as proxy parents for us,
and they did this outside their class time.
They did this on their own time.
This was because we lived together; we grew up as a family.
Of course there were the teachers who were unapproachable,
and there were some who played favorites,
and just a bunch of them whom you couldn’t talk to,
but they were the exception, they were not the norm.
And they recognized that we were kids who were still growing up,
and they needed to provide us that sort of scaffolding.
Although we did think that we were big boys then, but to be very honest,
now that I look back, I realize that I wasn’t.
Actually none of us were.
And the fact that they showed interest was important to us.
I remember when I was struggling with economics early in my 11th grade,
Mr. Mundos spent extra time with me,
when he could have been home with his family,
just so that I could understand what fiscal policy really is.
There is enough consensus in research to tell us
that if the teacher student relationship is solid,
then the learning will always advance.
Now as a faculty at a university,
I try to build the same kind of personal relationships.
Although it’s slightly difficult as we don’t share the same campus,
and the students that I teach are obviously older,
but by no means have they fully figured out their lives.
And that is where I try to help them.
One of the things I like doing inside a classroom is to walk around
if there are five minutes left of my class.
I like to walk around the class and make conversation
with everyone who’s willing to.
I want to know about their dreams, what their goals are,
I want to know where they come from.
I tell them where I come from, what my dreams were.
I ask them what they’re watching on Netflix,
and why they have not sent me a request on Instagram yet.
And by the way, Instagram is a fantastic place
if you want to know what the young people are up to.
I usually pay special attention to kids who don’t seem to have many friends
inside the class or feel isolated inside the classroom
because who could understand what loneliness is
better than a 10 year old kid who found himself alone at night
in a dormitory full of strangers?
This sort of thing is very important because what I do with these kids
is I shift their places,
something that is permitted in Indian higher education.
I shift their places, and I make them sit with kids who are kind or warm
and generally very talkative because it might create space
for some innocuous interactions to take place
that may build peer relationships,
which is equally important in terms of educating young people.
My students appreciate this immensely, and they’ve told me so multiple times
that they feel like paying attention in my classes
because they’re shown interest in their lives.
It has now come to a point where these people
who I’ve taught 5 years ago will message me
about life events that take place,
things like when they get married,
when they are applying for universities abroad,
they ask me to appraise university courses and so on and so forth.
Some even update me on the latest millennial term going around.
The last one I heard was called Stan,
which was basically someone who’s a massive fan of yours.
So it’s quite interesting.
This sort of relationship builds a human aspect to education.
So in that sense, I’ve always see my role as an assistant professor from a slightly
broader perspective of that of an educator or more of a holistic educator.
This is what my university also has as one of its major goals.
The greatest impact from St. Paul’s for me comes from the school’s motto,
“moniti meliora sequamur” meaning “having been advised, we follow higher things.”
For me there couldn’t be a better way to live.
I try to inculcate this in everything I do as an educator.
For instance, I remember when I was having coffee with a colleague a year ago,
and we were sitting and discussing is this all we’re going to do?
Is this all, that students will come year after year,
we’ll go into classrooms, and we’ll talk about the same old theories
which 100 years old given by Freud,
and they will get educated and leave.
Is this all we’re going to do for the next 30-40 years?
Then he said, no, there’s research that is exciting.
I said, research is exciting, but research is not inside the classroom.
You’re not collecting data, analyzing, or writing anything in the classroom,
you’re teaching still.
Don’t you feel stagnated?”
Then he concurred, he said: “Yeah I do feel stagnated.”
He was teaching for 6 years at this point.
So we figured that maybe we try and do something else.
Maybe we go and try and educate a larger corpus of people.
Then we thought the best way to do this
was through social media and educational technology.
So we tried to basically maximize our capabilities as educators.
This was before the pandemic came in.
So the first thing we did was we learned how to code.
Two psychology students with no knowledge of coding, but we learned how to code.
We built the Summarizing Psychology app, the UGC NET preparation app
and an app to learn SPSS.
Then a few months later, we realized that this is still slightly hands off,
it’s still information being given to only psychology students,
we need to inform more people about different concepts.
So to disseminate information in a clear and easy way,
we built a one-stop psychology podcast and an Instagram page,
which today has close to eight and a half thousand followers
and two and a half thousand listeners on our podcast.
The two of us weren’t really interested in social media,
we weren’t active on Instagram until then,
and this is a big badge of honor for both of us,
seeing that our content is being appreciated.
This also had a cascading effect on my students
who saw me doing so much with my life.
Then they approached me and said: “Why don’t we talk about football?”
One of the things in India that is missing is a decent podcast on football.
I was initially very hesitant about this because as a professor,
I’m supposed to live through this certain amount of dignity,
and football fans are full of banter.
So I didn’t know how I could mix that.
But then they said: “Why do you want to be so restricted?
You are passionate, you love the game.
Why not talk about it?”
Because they knew me well, they said:
“Would Richard Feynman have rejected something like this?”
And that was that.
Feynman is the inspiration for my teaching life,
I knew he wouldn’t reject such a chance.
So having been advised, I said: “Yes, why not?”
And just like that, The Talking Barefoot Podcast was born.
The Talking Barefoot, in that name, is a play on the fact
that India played the 1948 Summer Olympics barefoot.
In my pursuit of broadening my horizons,
I keep seeing my students trying to do new things.
I’ve seen some of them come with new TikTok videos,
they are on reels, and they are on YouTube.
All of this is a work of hard work at the end of it.
I’ve even tried to write a novel which I finished recently,
which is inspired by my life as a boarder in St. Paul’s called Homeward Bound.
Now the truth is that I’m not nearly as successful as it might sound.
It might seem like, wow, he’s doing so many things.
It is true, but it doesn’t mean all of these things are doing well.
But that doesn’t stop me, that doesn’t dampen my spirits at all.
All I can do, I know, is try.
I think that’s really all that all of us can ever do
to give our passions and dreams some flight.
I love teaching and that is my primary identity.
I’m inspired every day to get up and be a professor,
but I refuse to just be defined by it.
And that’s my message to you, refuse to stand still
because legacies aren’t built that way.
Take a risk, give yourself a chance
and nearly everything is possible if you’re slightly brave.
Or, as Feynman would have said:
“Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
Thank you.