He who can Teaches, He who cannot does everything else!
By Disha Doshi
As a young girl in my early teens, I staunchly believed in Bernard Shaw’s revolutionary quote “He who can does, he who cannot teaches”. Not that I thought of teaching as a derogatory profession but I always thought that being a teacher was one of the easiest of all career options on earth. The idea of teaching to me, then, was limited to teaching students some abstract theories of math and science that existed on earth for years, assigning homework, grading assignments and trying hard to make life a hell for them. What a profession I thought. One that pays you to make a hell out of student’s life!
It was only later when I delved more into my classes at under graduate and graduate school that I realized that teaching was in fact a very competitive and a demanding field. What I mean by competitive is that a teacher has to constantly compete with one’s self, trying to make the same concepts all the more lucid and more absorbing each year.
It is a challenging and monstrous task to teach the same concepts which you have mastered and known for years to a new batch of completely clueless beginners. I feel it is difficult maintaining the same sense of involvement and enthusiasm each time while teaching the same concept. I remember feeling irked when my younger brother asked me a second time about something he did not understand in the first place and almost losing my nerves the third time. Teaching thus entails too much patience on the part of the teacher.
An excellent and crowd grabbing teacher has to be passionate about what he teaches because only then the concepts he is trying to put forth to the students will have a feel of depth and meaning to it. In one of my classes this semester that is almost 3 hours long and ends at 9 PM, by the time the class is half way through, my concentration and interest both start decreasing exponentially. As the class approaches end, food becomes my major priority and the radical and universe- changing theory on tiny molecules and atoms only exasperate me. But the professor shows exactly the same excitement and eagerness as he had before 3 hours at the start of the class. This level of passion and commitment are some of the difficult ingredients of being a good teacher.
I no longer agree with Bernard Shaw and now believe that teaching is amongst the most challenging professions. You could go to your office one day and not feel like working and put up some random mediocre work and come back but you cannot do that while teaching because you have a live audience ready to pounce on you with their doubts and fresh ideas!
