I was to speak on ‘Theoretical Perspective of Autobiography’ in a workshop for in-service teacher educators. I wondered why these elementary school teachers needed to be oriented on the theory of autobiography theory. A language teacher does require a perspective on the autobiography because he has to teach. What about a math teacher? Or a science teacher?
Further, the focus here was autobiography, not biography. That gives out a second thought. Autobiography is the development of a man in himself, his unwrapping of the past to free the worries of the future. Augustine, Rousseau, and Beckett seemed to me out of context here. What captured my thought is that a teacher’s life should not be wasted in the air, but invested in the paper. I found my twist in the call to hurl teachers into the process of writing their seen, felt, and lived experiences.
And why should a teacher write? The answer lies in the connections he establishes among various stakeholders throughout his life. A teacher’s life is, no doubt, important to be spread, and sacred to be preserved. His or her experiences should be passed through and siphoned on a refined note. His live encountered with challenges in every walk of school life must be read in order to learn his solutions to those challenges. His love and hatred have to be recorded over time. And this could only be made possible if he pours his life on paper. So autobiography becomes an important piece of representation of what a teacher endures during his teaching career.
If teachers don’t come out to write, then who else? We find more non-teacher people taking it upon themselves to write or speak on the issues concerning school and teaching. Few teachers do so. We may have an uncle living near our house with a lot of suggestions on how to improve schools. News anchors would guide us through the process of how a classroom is managed. Parliamentarians would come out with a policy on whether a student should be detained, or not. Does not the teacher abstain from writing on the issues that revolve around school life? There are a thousand reasons that teachers should take pains in writing- to improve their practices and to see writers in their students. No doubt, teachers sprout life in their students, but teachers who write do this in concrete terms.
A teacher is considered prestigious in our society. We listen to him. We let our kids grow under his shadow. His life is nothing but what his students have achieved. During his career of teaching, he has been experimenting. He allows himself to be lost to fix the future for his students. His colleagues, students, parents, classrooms, and the roads he walked through have taught him to form hypotheses, make decisions, and be determined for changes. If these endeavors are not enough to make a teacher think that he has one more duty, i.e., to record his schooling encounters, ample reasons are coming ahead.
The teacher’s life is a reflection of his choices and checks. He has an attitude, a philosophy, and a convention to his profession which needs to get a voice. He may have chosen this profession because his family or friends want him to do so. He would have strived to be a doctor or an engineer or something else, but not a teacher, but somehow he fell into the circumstances leading him to be a teacher. He might have been determined to be a teacher, and he is now a teacher. He might have some notions of why he should teach. He might have hated a teacher during school life because he had not cleared his confusion and had made the subject more complex and that conspired him to be a teacher because he did not want others to face the same fate he had gone through. He might have found a teacher who had guided him and awakened him to the noble profession of teaching. So, a teacher’s life is woven around the webs of dooms and graces. He has many inspiring corners that the world awaits to know, as well as besetting corners that the world seeks a solution for them.
A teacher’s day is not a day at cafe coffee day, ordering a coffee, chatting with friends, gazing at different corners, looking at the empty coffee mug, reordering the coffee, paying the bill. A teacher lives his day on the chapters he had previously taught. He might have not slept the whole night thinking of Mr Amar, Akbar, and Anthony who are not prospering in learning as others. Deep down in books, consulting his peers, for a single eureka to bring a single change in their life. A teacher’s day is spent as a mother who spends her first two hours when she has to manage her children to school and her husband to the office. Looking back at what a teacher does can provide enough ingredients that could speak for themselves in the story.
Why am I pointing to the various roles a teacher holds throughout his teaching career? Why am I talking about his beliefs, notions, and designs? A teacher is a persona. A persona is not an empty vessel. It tops up in victories, falls, bliss, and distress. A persona should not be lost in the cycle of time. Writing is the only savior to his persona that he could turn to to protect it from being lost.
It’s not that the teacher doesn’t write. Of course, he writes. He writes to plan his lesson; he writes WhatsApp chats; he writes on Facebook posts; he writes on the diaries of his students; he writes on the blackboard; he writes on the notebooks of his students; he writes to sign cheques or office orders; he writes questions for the exam. Important as these forms of writing look undeniable and this is what a teacher is hired for, even greater is to write his self, his values, his experiments, his love and aversion, his beliefs to teaching, his notions of classroom strategies, his designs to control the specific behavior of a specific student, and these are the things he is not hired for. He would not have had a pay cut if he had not penned down a single piece of reflection in his entire teaching career. Writing is an entirely self-rectifying activity that someone performs if he thinks that he and what he does is an asset.
Writing about classroom practices takes us on a new journey of making a profession. Writing about happenings inside a classroom is questioning our practices, empowering ourselves regarding new dimensions of teaching and learning, and valuing our profession. One has to think back and ahead if he wants his writing to take over those wonderful moments, those addas which he had spent in dialogues carrying past frustrations and future delight with fellow teachers. His temper to not compromise with what is going on which he desists and his persistence to follow his path, no matter what may come, should be made to get some breadth on the pages.