September 5, 2020 will be remembered as ‘Teacher’s Day’ with a difference. There will be no celebration and students won’t be able to wish their teachers in person. And yet this is the time when teachers deserve special respect and recognition for meeting the challenges posed by the Covid19 pandemic. Teachers are trying their utmost to reach out to their students via the online mode even if that meant learning new skills and reconfiguring the tried and tested methods of classroom teaching. Teachers have often suffered from the agony of being in a ‘low prestige profession.’ Even at this point of the pandemic they are not considered frontline workers or first responders, simply because they are not healthcare professionals. But to keep millions of students gainfully engaged in activating their cognitive skills of thinking, reading, learning, remembering, reasoning, and paying attention to what is taught, is a very demanding task.
A teacher is constantly learning because students are not homogenously endowed with the same set of capacities/potentials. Each child learns at his/her own pace. To recognize that and to make special effort to address the needs of those that require more time to understand and learn is what real teaching is all about. More than any other profession it is teaching that demands that teachers remain motivated. Only a motivated teacher can motivate students. But are teachers getting enough motivational courses and refresher courses so that they reinvent their pedagogies?
It is unfortunate that India does not provide teachers’ ‘visitation’ which means that teachers visit other schools to see how their peers are teaching and what new methods they are adopting. This cross –fertilization of the teaching-learning process is valuable to improving the teacher’s output.
Covid19 has brought parents and teachers closer to each other because parents have become supervisors for their children’s education at home. In fact many parents have learnt along with their children and some parents have even contributed to enriching the teaching-learning experiences and sharing ideas with school principals and teachers with the sole aim of making learning a more experiential activity. Indeed parents and teachers have established a new equilibrium and they are trying to find a new normal for learning in the midst of the challenges posed by the pandemic.
The other challenge for teachers and educational institutions is to see that no child is left behind because of the digital divide during this pandemic. This divide is not merely because of unstable internet connectivity but because most families cannot afford modern gadgets. Covid19 has taught educators and governments that smartphones and tablets are no longer luxuries but are an integral part of education henceforth.
