How My School Failed Me
I remember how my second grade teacher used to humiliate me in front of the entire batch merely because the distance between my school and my house wasn’t enough for me to arrive late at times. She used to make a spectacle out it. Every darn time. She used to make me stand in the corridor, take me to the headmistress’s office and what not. Well, she was probably trying to teach me to be punctual but could there have been a better way? Hell, yes! I mean I was barely 7 years old for god’s sake.
It took a toll on my mental and physical health — I ended up gaining kilos of weight for which btw I blamed my grandmother for a very long time (Sorry nani, and thanks for feeding this kid all that yummy food!). And, maybe I’m being a bit overdramatic here, but I did gain that weight. And again, fat kid in a school? Nightmare. Fat girl? Cherry on top. I am not even kidding, young fat girls used to be like stress balls. I remember so many occasions where so many professors shamed girls left right and center for being fat because that somehow reminded them of “lazy fat housewives”. Again, not kidding. In fact, ironically, this used to come from a lot of fat professors.
Moving on, there were favorites, and then there were favorites among favorites. And these ten kids and ten teachers ran their own mini school. The teachers would give these ten kids all sort of opportunities, and they would excel at them because technically there’s no competition left, then praises would be thrown at them during various kinds of events including parent-teacher meetings (which were all about looking around and noting down who all not to look directly in the eyes for the next few days). And the cycle would repeat. I think this is the only vicious cycle so many wanted to get stuck in.
The only area where I got somewhere lucky was academics — I was a pretty decent student so I mostly never had to bother about teachers shouting at me for not scoring good enough in exams. But there were others who where made to believe that they won’t be able to do anything good in their life because they aren’t scoring enough, that they are nothing but big failures. I mostly never bothered about it because the words were not directly said to me but now looking back I realize how harsh they were. I cannot possibly imagine how the ones at the receiving end of them must have felt. The only justification teachers had for all of this was “tumhare bhale ke liye bolte hai” (that it’s all for your own good), so that you learn and grow but I hardly know anyone who really benefitted from it. Not everything has a happy ending, I suppose?
While spending most of our time trying to teach children math and science, somehow we tend to forget them to teach values. Not because we don’t tell them to be kind and fair, but because we end up showing them how not to be kind and fair.
However, I don’t know if all schools are that bad or if mine was a special case. Maybe school was not that bad. Maybe it’s much worse in my head. No wait, it was bad. My heart totally goes out for me, but somehow if your school was even a bit similar, it somehow makes me sadder because these are the sort of loopholes in the education system which we don’t talk much about and which are pretty difficult to work around. How do you account for the sympathy or the empathy that a lot of teachers lack? How do you fix this system which somehow ends up producing troubled adults who certainly do not make this world a better place to live? How do you bring a change? Where do you start and where do you end? There are questions that we as parents, educators, and mentors need to ask ourselves.
And of course, not all teachers are bad. Some are pure gems. And the system fails them equally because they can’t possibly alone make up for everything that is wrong.
