EDUCATION SPECIAL..FROM BOARDROOM TO BLACKBOARD

People from well-paying professions like banking and IT are giving up corporate jobs for hard realities of school teaching. Are they opting out of the rat race or chasing happiness?

Teaching is not everyone’s dream job. The embarrassingly low salaries, the headache of monitoring hordes of unruly children and limited scope of professional growth ensure that not everyone wants to modestly plug away and try improving the minds in their care. Despite such odds, why are scores of jet-setting, well-paid professionals chucking their cushy jobs to get inside a classroom? For 45-year-old Vijay Shetty, a former advertising professional from Mumbai, it is the instant gratification that he gets from the job. “A smile from a student or a scowl immediately tells you how you have fared. By becoming a teacher, I have actually become a student all over again. My students teach me so much,” says Shetty who teaches French at Sancta Maria International School in Hyderabad. He also teaches at St Mary’s College in the city. Shetty was doing well for himself as an advertising professional. But a teaching stint with an NGO in Port Blair in 2005 changed the direction of his professional life. “I discovered paradise there and decided to stick with teaching,” says Shetty.
Even though the salary is much less than what he was drawing selling soaps and cellphones, the job satisfaction more than makes up for the gap. Nitin Padte would know this feeling. Some years ago he quit his job as a high-profile editor of a national daily to teach journalism at the Kodaikanal International School at almost one-tenth his salary. But just a month into teaching, Padte realised this is what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. Padte, who has been a journalist for 14 years and a teacher for 16, believes that teaching is a much harder job. “It requires you to surrender your soul to it,” says Padte, who is now deputy head of the secondary section at the Ecole Mondiale World School in Mumbai.
It also requires one to give much more to one’s lessons than what textbooks provide. Shaju George, who teaches economics and business studies to classes XI and XII in Delhi’s Modern School, Barakhamba Road, frequently uses his work experience in the retail and banking sectors in the US to explain concepts like recession, unemployment and organization structure. “For instance, I tell my students how in the US people who are unemployed often stand by the road with a placard in hand, asking for jobs. The imagery pulls them into the lesson and they are able to pay more attention to what is being taught,” says George who worked with Walmart in Dallas and later with the Bank of America.
Often it’s this out-of-the-box approach to education that’s sorely missed in Indian schools. Twenty-sevenyear-old Gaurav Singh got first-hand experience of this gap when he taught students from low-income families in Pune and Mumbai as part of a two-year fellowship with Teach for India. “The quality of teaching in such schools is so low that children in class V will have the writing and counting skills of kindergarten. In the absence of quality training they don’t grasp the basics and many, eventually, drop out,” says Singh who used to work with IT consulting giant Accenture as an engineer. Now, he has set his heart on setting up schools that provide high calibre teaching talent to children from all economic backgrounds instead of going back to his cushy corporate job. “It’s not a sacrifice,” he clarifies. “I derive joy from unleashing potential, shaping the future. It gives me a sense of satisfaction.”
Like him, Shalini Datta, 33, is another TFI fellow who plans to stick to teaching school children. After working for nine years as a chemical engineer with Cognizant in Kolkata, she is now a class teacher at a BMC primary school in Mumbai. “Teaching has rekindled my belief that it’s possible to bring about systemic changes in society,” says Datta. She wants to use her skills of leadership and communication, which she learnt from her corporate career, to make quality education accessible to more children.
But not all experts are enthused by the trend. As Prof Anita Rampal, dean of department of education, Delhi University points out: “To think that anyone with good intentions can teach at primary level can be quite damaging. Such people are de-professionalising teaching. If people from different professional backgrounds want to teach they first need to undergo rigorous professional training to be a teacher. Or else they can help by extending academic support.” Rampal switched from research to teaching by developing curricula for schools in rural Madhya Pradesh.
(SHOBITA DHAR TOICREST24D1211)