This isn’t news, but still. I have avoided email-internet-telephone-mobile like the plague and the only good news is that I have discovered “If you shun the world, the world shuns you.” On an average and extremely boring day, I get about 20 calls, today I got only 3 calls and all from Aircel regarding some free ringtones. Guess I have ceased to exist. I don’t know how else to manage my life. I need to get this PhD done in a couple of months. By end of June. So, there’s all the attendant reading that goes on. Next, I need to keep myself occupied and not worrying about who-wins-what in this elections.
In the midst of this I have got to value papers. 170 answer-scripts. I feel sleepy already.
The worst side-effect of reading on ELT is that I am getting drawn back into teaching, into the magic that you can create in classrooms. Really, the only time I have forgot all my preoccupations, all my worries, has been in the classroom, as a teacher. If only I had a teaching job where I didn’t have to sit at my workplace from 9 to 5, if only I could drop in, teach and get back home. I wouldn’t say it is a noble profession. It is a vulnerable position and I like that. It is like being a writer. You are vulnerable. That makes you strong, somehow. Not in a I-can-put-it-down-into-words sort of way. I have shared more secrets about myself with a class of eighty-nine than with a close friend for a decade. May be I did that for the ice-breaking, may be I did that to tell them that to write or to speak English you really didn’t need extremely priveleged backgrounds. There are so many things that I would not tell anyone for loss of face, but those things I could tell those teenagers. And for the first time in life, I also learned to listen to others PoV. Sometimes, when people take radically “wrong” stands, I simply shut off. But when the young ones are saying something I naturally listen. I want to give them a complete hearing. Then I accept the bits of it that I can relate to. Sigh!
I think teaching, like writing is extremely intimate. Except that, since English in an Engineering College is low-status/ low-priority, there’ s not much that a teacher can derive out of the job. I will stop right now. Otherwise, this shape-shifting soul of mine will start glorifying everything else she’s doing…
Hi Meena,
I read your post today and hope you make it thru the final leg of your PhD study, just take sometime off from everyday news, its going to be around ever. This reminds me of my time completing my Master’s thesis (a small task compared to a PhD) but was hopelessly stuck due to lack of ideas. But just forgetting that I was not making much progress I worked on it day and night and completed it well.
I have always thought that teaching was a most excellent profession, nothing beats it, I used to be an teaching assistant in school, which I loved due to the fact that teaching others taught me more than others.
Take care,
–Aj
Hi Meena,
All the best for your PhD and you can totally take some time off. No need to be a hermit.
Teaching is an excellent profession. I am a software engineer and believe me, sitting in one place for 8 hours a day is not fun. It is the most boring job in the world.
thank goodness for you. I love your writing. that’s all