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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Aug 10, 2015 13:29:56 GMT 5.5
Inaugurating our WriTalk series on the forum, we have Naorem Ibosana with us to talk with me on the broad theme—Teachers, Students and Social Development. (Writalk is a term coined here to mean a discussion in which participants write their views and responses to other participants' views on an online discussion platform or in e-mail list discussions. It can be used both as a noun and as a verb.)
Many of our readers already know Ibosana while others need a brief introduction. Naorem Ibosana is the third child and second son of Naorem Tikendra Singh and Naorem Tharoyaima Devi of Khongnang Lamtei Pareng, Kakching Wairi Sabal Leikai. He taught English at Trinity High School, Pallel (2004-2009) and Amutombi Divine Life English School, Wabagai (2012). At present he is running the Oasis Boarding Home for school children from class VIII to X. Teaching is one of the several professions he can lay his hand on, and here I am briefly introducing only the side of him that is relevant to the theme at hand.
Hi Ibosana, many thanks for being my guest here in this inaugural chapter of the WriTalk series to talk about issues within the broad theme of Teachers, Students and Social Development. This is going to be historic. |
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Aug 10, 2015 15:20:01 GMT 5.5
How did you come into teaching? Did teaching have any attraction for you while you were younger and going to college? Did anything specific about teaching make you to choose teaching as your profession? Did you want to do anything with teaching? |
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Post by ibosana on Aug 19, 2015 23:48:23 GMT 5.5
Yes, with pleasure. I think I should trace the story back to the dim and distant part of my past. I had the pleasure of my juniors' company. They often needed my help especially in their studies. I started teaching them and found it delighteful. That impulse became the seed of my career. Then it was just after I got through my twelft class when I had to either give up further study and go for earning or learn with earning. I chose the second because it was my passion. Thus started my career. However my formal teaching career began in 2004 when I was selected as an assistant teacher at Trinity High School Pallel.
Yes, of course. I still feel how it delighted me in those days.
Yes. A profession that needs sincerity, dedication and improves human resources. It's a profession inherited from the mythical time. After all it's my childhood passion. All these make me choose teaching as my profession.
Yes. May be I can impart only a little knowledge to students' community but I will try my best to make them true and responsible persons worthy to live on earth. This is possible for me only through teaching.
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Aug 20, 2015 19:20:43 GMT 5.5
I think you are "more" at home in your profession or career if it takes root in your childhood and young adulthood experience (at least in some abstract way) while it is not to say that you can do nothing well professionally if your childhood and young adulthood did not groom you that way. Of course any person can find their passion any time in their life, early or late, and many perform very well even when they are in professions elsewhere than their passion roosts, and nothing new grows totally out of the old. By experience I mean sort of a tendency which provides a degree of preparedness, curiosity and enthusiasm. It is less about how you perform than how you find yourself in the profession; that is, your personal satisfaction.
Here I say "less about how you perform than how you find yourself in the profession" and emphasize it because as we are humans with feelings affecting what we do and how we act, not mechanical beings, there is a relation between the two--how you perform and how you find yourself in the profession. Those who go far into a profession and succeed at least appreciably take their profession more than just as a profession or job. For such people what they do is their life--they live that life and they die in that--retirement is a formal official thing, but people with deep passion for what they have always done all their life never stop doing that. This is one marker that distinguishes passionate people from those who are not. What they do is what they put their life in, like being at "home." So, for a person to be in a profession or career for a long time (it is only when you do something for at least considerably long that you can make some contribution remarkable in that field), major part of that profession or career has to be a passion with them, or if it is not already a passion, it has to somehow turn into one along the way. The length of time you remain in a profession does not solely determine whether or not you can make a contribution in the field (many people linger in professions from their first job until their retirement without having moved an inch in this regard), but it is passion that drives you while enough time gives you enough temporal space essential for any meaningful contribution.
Why I am bringing passion into the discussion and I want to emphasize this element is because there seems to be a relation between lack of teaching passion on the part of most of teachers from elementary schools to colleges in Manipur on the one and and the poor results in the students' overall development (which is evident from not only what most youths do and but also what they don't do) on the other, as we see before us today.
What opinion do you have on this matter, which I would regard as an "issue"? |
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Post by Somak Meitei on Aug 21, 2015 18:46:29 GMT 5.5
Your passion for taking an important role in creating a world full of inhabitants who would be our so-called intellectuals--an evolution that would be able to make a better world --instils me a lot of insistence on jotting down something as expressing how a teacher invests his energy in teaching his students, who are our future pillars, that we use as so often mention whenever we have a conversation on ' Students And Our Future'. To what extent has/is the one who has obcession for teaching studied/studying so as to impart the knowledge to those one thinks as one's students? As for me , this question sometimes seems to push me to the verge of giving up acting in the world of teaching and sometimes seems to encourage me to work harder to make my dream fruitful. What I am saying here would be vague to you all. I believe your answer would be ' I have done and am doing the thing' , which would sound believable and plausible. The intense feeling I have here is nothing but the eagerness of saying that what you wrote in your post would make it sure that you would win high praise from the thing you had been determined to do for an educational evolution and your absorption in teaching, which your environment and inner feeling interested you in choosing after taking a great decision. I, who cannot write prolifically, have no words to detail how the teachers in Manipur struggles to be able to work between their means and ends. They invest a lot of money in buying books to gain knowledge enough to guide their students through a way with a mixture of pleasant and unpleasat things to the world they dream of. They alway try to study more than the number of hours they often tell their students and the way on which they often advise their students. I will ever remain thankful to your appraisal as regards the motive for choosing the profession.
I might have written it errorneously, and the reader would feel ennui if he happens to read it, but I would appreciate him if he corrects the mistakes, which are of slips of the pen--it would be more appropriate to say 'errors or my ignorance'-- and makes a great comment on it.
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Aug 21, 2015 22:58:04 GMT 5.5
While this main writalk conversation goes on, anybody who wants to ask questions to our guest Naorem Ibosana or to give some opinion on any point made here (either by me or Ibosana or by any other commenators) is welcome to say what they want. Still it should be made sure that any post written here is strictly to the point. Please also think whether you would better open a new thread if your post will make a thick writalk on its own right. If so, you can open a separate thread, but it that is intended to be a writalk, please communicate with the person you want to writalk with before you start your thread so you make sure they participate.
Somak Meitei has a reply to Ibosana's post above. He has opened a separate thread in this same board. However, thinking that that comment would better be where the post that comment is on, I have merged Somak Meitei's post into this thread, and now it appears as the post above this current one.
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Aug 23, 2015 15:38:07 GMT 5.5
I will embed the writalk with things I heard from people or read in books when appropriate. Here, I am sharing part of Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen's recent book An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions (2013). This is from the fifth chapter, The Centrality of Education. In this excerpt, the authors speak more about il/literacy and its relevance to development. However, as the title indicates, the relevance of il/literacy can be stretched to cover education (as the authors themsrlves do in the chapter) to bring the matter into direct relevance to the shocking social problems we are experiencing everyday.
I have avoided highlighting key sentenses and passages in the reproductio so the reader can find for themselves the points being made here.
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