My teaching experiences

My
classroom teaching experiences

Teaching is
learning. It has been four years that I am teaching various things at IIPHG.
Not only I enjoy it, I feel liberated while as well as after teaching.  These years of teaching provided me
opportunities to learn three things apart from other many interesting learning;
these are objectivity, humility and patience. 
I explain below all the three in little detail. 

Objectivity to me
is an ability to understand and accept different viewpoints and beliefs.
Earlier, I used to build opinions and also tend to put higher weight on my
viewpoints over others. Teaching – and interaction with equally talented
participants – has immensely helped me understand my limitation. I now tend to
accept different viewpoints and could also share them during my teaching making
it more interactive. While I have become open to different viewpoints, there
came also a realization that facts and views are two very different
things.   

Humility for me is
an ability to remain humble and grounded with realization of one’s limitation
in the light of one’s abilities. Teaching is like swimming; howsoever good a
swimmer one is, in the vast ocean this ability of swimming is limited. As a
teacher, while one knows the subject a great deal, this knowledge remains
limited against the ever-expanding curiosity of the students. For me, while
teaching remained sharing of ‘already existing knowledge’ on one hand, there
has been interesting learning on various ways of ‘transferring’ it to the
participants. There has always been a great deal of learning that happens from
the participants as well. 

Patience in context
of teaching is an ability to remain positively composed while waiting to
express my viewpoints and letting someone else complete his/her explanation. It
also means agreeing to disagree at times. Teaching – in terms of imparting
newer insights/perspective/knowledge/skills – truly helps me improve my
patience. There has truly been a quantum jump in my ability to withhold and
listen. 

My overall
experience of teaching has taught me an important lesson – ‘While
responsibility of learning lies with the students, the responsibility of
creating an environment in which one can learn at ease lies with the teacher. I
strive to create such an environment during the 60 minutes that I am with my
students, every time.