An image of a docile student sitting
in a classroom listening attentively to the teacher is almost iconic and
clichéd. Indeed the said student could in fact be seething with aggression or
frustration and may with great difficulty be keeping his or her open eyes
plastered on the teacher in order to almost unconsciously live up to this
common clichéd perception of learning. Indeed the entire field of learning, in
this case the classroom and all its constituents, is a veritable maelstrom of
conflicting contradictory thoughts, emotions, mental processes and
psychological phenomena all of which clearly impact the learning process and
outcome.
There is an existential dichotomy as
it were, in all that transpires in the hallowed portals of teaching and
learning. There is a forever primal urge to unify divergent processes which
constant seek to meet and create the ‘aha’ or moment for the learner and the
teacher when there is a deep sense of self-worth, understanding, actual transmission
of learning and a kind of conceptual rootedness. At this apogee, there is no
vestige of fear and a complete absence of self-doubt. I would like to refer to
this as a state of learning wholeness wherein the two divergent streams have
become one.
From the preceptor’s perspective, the
entire teaching exercise is a kind of preparatory, iterative, awkward ritual
that is supposed to be a preamble to the actual concept clarity and proficiency
in application that are intended outcomes. In the common scenario that the
learner is unrevealing about his comprehension of the teaching and is mostly
blank faced, the teacher is fishing for cues of learner involvement, throwing
in a bait of a question or cracking a joke to be able to decipher what is going
on inside the learner’s head. And all this while he has solid theory content to
cover along with application questions as a staple load.
The weary learner has survived parents’
expectations. On top of this, he/she is struggling with self worth issues (am I good enough, kind of conversations)
as a background noise. Superimposed on these in the classroom are the shrieks,
as it were, of ‘I am not understanding this. Shit!!’ This sort of thing is
compounded in the early phases of learning because there is very little prior
knowledge at the disposal of the learner which could facilitate the
understanding and help his/her to build bridges from what is already known to
what new is being taught. This entire process is like a circular trajectory,
which forms smaller and smaller circles and finally collapses or involutes to a
point, at which all learning and prior knowledge suddenly fits together. There
is a lightening of spirit and opening of hitherto un-traversed conceptual coves
for the learner, a sort of unifying ‘gotcha’ moment.
Teachers are special birds, as Plum
would have put it. May their tribe increase.
