A teacher for the past three years, Urmila Thapa Magar, 23, loves her job, although she started teaching only because she had “tons of free time and nothing better to do.”[break]
Her college was over before noon, leaving her free the whole day. She decided to work and looked around for a job at a school nearby.
A few months later, she switched to her current school, Dhapakhel English Boarding School, in Lalitpur where she teaches Social Studies and Environment Studies to Grade Nine and 10 students. Here, she not only fell in love with the school but with the profession of a teacher as well.
For Urmila, currently doing her MA in English, teaching is the best job in the world because you teach and learn something new everyday.
Perhaps that is why, after a particularly exhausting lesson, she and her students share jokes among themselves, discuss day to day lives and occasionally head to the sports ground for a badminton game.
Meet Ujjwol Paudel, 18, teacher at Bal Sarathi School at Pingalsthan, Gaushala, who, to his students, is as much a teacher as friend, for the generation gap is negligible.
He shares his love for art with his students. Discussing paintings like the Mona Lisa, a portrait by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci, is a regular activity. He believes this is important to build a friendly relation within the classroom. “I have to first be their friend to be their teacher,” he says.
This dual role is characteristic of all the newer generation of teachers in their late teens and twenties. While more elderly teachers are more often than not treated like parent figures, younger teachers are thought of as siblings or friends by their students.
This equation, according to these younger-generation teachers, is the biggest advantage they have.
“While the senior teachers demand a pin-drop silence, my class is more of an interactive session,” shares 18-year-old Siddhartha Hamal Dhakal who teaches science to grade five students at Keta Keti School of Gaushala.
Older teachers often turn up their noses at their lenient ways, which are not the conventional methods. But as long as it creates an environment whereby students open up, these young teachers are happy about their teaching techniques.
“If my lesson is boring, students don’t mind telling me so,’’ says Siddhartha. When he joined a few months ago, he was fresh out of high school and did not want to appear strict to his students.
So, “I participate equally in the classroom,” he shares, adding “whether it is for not doing homework or disobeying, punishment is never going to be my style.”
He had always wanted to be a teacher, for the profession was in the family. His father was the principal of the school he went to. His “style,” similar to that of Urmila and Ujjwol, includes discussing the reasons behind the failure rate and its phenomenon besetting today’s young students.
Although not a lucrative profession, “there are many advantages, like respect, job satisfaction and timings’’ in teaching, says 22-year-old Preity Dhungana who teaches at Olympia World School of Babar Mahal. She joined when she had “just finished my 10+2 examinations and was free for a few months.”
She took rhymes classes for Nursery and L.K.G. groups. The classes initially were quite challenging for her because “they wouldn’t sit at the same place for even two minutes,” she recalls.
The job, however, had good aspects too. “Kids made paper cards for me just to say how much they loved me. I still have some of the cards,” she shares.
“These little acts of love,” she adds, helped her make the decision, and now she wants to continue the profession. Although she had to leave the school owing to her studies, she rejoined it later.
The second time around, the job is even better. “Establishing authority can take some time, but once you learn the skills, everything is as smooth as butter,” she says.
Like Preity, the fear of being taken for granted haunts many in this teaching tribe. It is not, however, all that easy to pull the wool over their young eyes.
One boy in 21-year-old Ranjana Koirala’s English class had “terrible handwriting and showed no signs of improvement.” So she had to assign him an extra page of handwriting until he improved significantly.
“I was strict enough with him to have him complete that extra page along with his homework,” she says, adding “You have to draw the line somewhere.’’
That is the teaching world according to these young Sirs and Misses.
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