Number of words: 1,265
Asha (not her real name) is the youngest bahu in a large joint family that stays in West Delhi. She got married a few months before India went into lockdown. Her husband works with an IT company in Gurgaon and is now having to work from home. Asha teaches chemistry to high school students at one of the oldest and largest schools in her part of town. Nowadays, she does so online.
Online school begins at 7:30 am every day, but her day begins a couple of hours earlier, for she has to cook for the family as well. She took up teaching years ago because she enjoys it, but the act of communicating with her students through a laptop screen every day is now starting to wear her down.
Teaching is a three-dimensional skill that depends a great deal on reading the body language of one’s students, but the lack of non-verbal cues in the virtual world has made her task that much more difficult. Fortunately, the rapport that she had already built with her students before the great pandemic shut everything down is standing her in good stead. But for how much longer, she wonders.
By the time online school ends at 2:30, she is exhausted, and just wants to sleep for the next few hours. This, however, is not an option because there are assignments that need to be checked and the next day’s sessions that need to be planned. Then there’s the housework.
The exhaustion that Asha feels daily is not unusual. As a recent article on “zoom fatigue” in National Geographic points out, virtual interactions can be hard on the brain. Cyber psychologists call it ‘continuous partial attention’ that comes with trying to teach and read facial cues on several small faces on a screen at the same time. The problem with focusing on a single student, on the other hand, is that she then can’t see the non-active participants’ behaviour, something that would normally be visible with peripheral vision in a normal classroom situation.
But even the excessive tiredness that comes with online teaching is not as worrying for her and her colleagues as is the specter of a salary cut in view of the sudden drop in the tuition fees that the school is receiving.
She says, “The government has told schools that they cannot ‘force’ parents to pay school fees, because of the current economic climate. At the same time, they have told schools to pay teachers’ salaries. But where will our salaries come from if the parents are not paying school fees?”
Asha also finds some parents’ reluctance to pay tuition fee bewildering. She is hurt because they consider online learning a ‘gimmick’.
“I don’t think any of us are particularly crazy about online teaching, but it’s sad when parents don’t see the amount of work that goes into preparing online lessons and keeping kids’ attention. It’s one thing to do a one-off webinar, it’s quite another to teach online day after day.”
Asha’s experience is not unique. Schoolteachers who have had to make the switch to online teaching are finding the prospect of salary cuts more than a little unfair, given the longer hours and extra work they are having to put in, and the financial uncertainty they are facing.
A Gurgaon school principal points out: “The government needs to stop ‘playing to the gallery’ at a time like this, and instead come up with a win-win strategy for everyone, not just for themselves. I realize that parents make up a bigger vote bank than teachers, but demonizing non-aided, independent schools helps no one, least of all our children for whom all this is supposed to be. By rights, education and health should be handled by the government, but since most government schools are so sadly sub-standard, parents prefer to send their kids to private schools. — Including the holier-than-thou politicians who accuse us of profiteering.”
This principal has shed light on two important points: 1) Private schools have become easy whipping posts for those in power, used ever so often to score populist brownie points with the larger constituency of parents. 2) Instead of treating non-aided institutions like pariahs, governments would do well to sit across the table with them and find solutions that work for everyone, not just for the biggest vote banks.
Delhi’s Education Minister’s dismissive advice to school owners, for example, to dig into their pockets to find a way to pay teachers’ salaries during lockdown has not gone down well with many in the teaching community. While it is true that some privately-run schools have been guilty of excess and malpractice, to tar all educational institutions with the same brush is not only in poor taste, it is also deeply demotivating for sincere educators in these schools.
Schoolteachers aren’t the only ones having a difficult time. College educators are also facing their own unique challenges during this time of lockdown. A teacher in a government college in rural Haryana talks about the two divides afflicting online education. The first, she says, is the digital divide. Some students just don’t have smartphones, and have thus been left completely out of the teaching loop. The second she calls the administration/teacher divide. — Those who work in the department of education and issue diktats to schools and teachers often have little, if any, understanding of ground realities, and expect teachers to implement them unquestioningly.
“We have been told to ‘connect digitally with the students,” she says, “but how? The Shiksha Setu app we have been told to use is clunky and often hangs. I tried to make a class WhatsApp group, but that posed its own challenges. The girls had privacy concerns. They didn’t want the boys in class to have their phone numbers, so I had to create two WhatsApp groups. And that too, in a co-ed college. It’s one thing for the Department of Education to issue a farmaan, it’s quite another for teachers to implement it on the ground.”
There is a scene in the first episode of the 1980s BBC serial “Yes Minister”, where the newly appointed Minister for Administrative Affairs, Jim Hacker, is having a conversation with his assistant, Frank, and his wife, Annie, and discussing portfolio appointments in the newly appointed government:
Frank: Did you know that Martin’s got the Foreign Office? Jack’s got Health, Fred’s got energy.
Annie: Has anybody got brains?
James: You mean Education?
Annie: No, I know what I mean.
Unfortunately, so do we.
Martin Luther once said, “Human reasoning is like a drunken man on a horse. You prop him on one side, he falls off the other.” Government policies without adequate consultation, discussion, and dialogue with all the involved stakeholders are a bit like that, too. Without enough checks and balances in place, unilateral and top-down decision-making can end up toppling the best-intentioned initiatives.
With something as important as education and the future of our children, it is imperative that governments take a collaborative and consultative approach instead of a combative, confrontational, and dictatorial one. The best solutions emerge in an atmosphere of mutual respect. In this case, it is vital that the government sits across the table and talks with educators and school leaders, not at them. What is at stake, otherwise, is the well-being of our teachers and the future of our students.
In all the sundry ‘wars’ that the government has purportedly fought over the last few years — on corruption, poverty, and now, Covid-19 — a lot of collateral damage has been done. We do not need anymore.
Excerpted from https://medium.com/@writerohit/schools-may-have-cut-their-fees-but-its-the-teachers-who-are-paying-the-price-9b13db4dfdaa