In the Green Room of a Teacher's Performance

On stage, we watch as the teacher turns to scrawl on the board, commanding pin-drop silence and claiming to have a third eye in the back of her head. What we don't know is the racket going on backstage – in her mind – and the labour that goes into constructing the performance. You'd be surprised and awed to find out the details. 

The teaching profession is viewed through a variety of lenses. It's a stepping stone for a lot of people looking for work experience or more money in the wallet, especially those trying to finance their way through graduate school by teaching lower-level classes. For others, it's an outlet for their passion to impart knowledge and communicate with eager (and often not so eager) minds. In either case, students are left grappling with the workload upon starting out as teachers once they realise how much psychological and physical preparation it entails. "You have to be so many things when you're up there – an instructor, a listener…an actor," one of my professors told me recently on our last day of the Teaching Practicum I'd been taking with her at North South University. The course shed light on how teaching, more than anything, is a performance art. 

The first few lectures ingrained in us the significance of a teaching philosophy; this forms the backbone of your performance – the plot, so to speak. Through discussion and introspection, we had to think about why we want to be teachers, our basic underlying goals and how we would implement them. It can be summed up in a phrase – some of us wanted to help students find their strengths, for instance, while others wanted to push them to question norms and standards; Dr. Li, the course instructor, phrased her goal as "fostering self-development." We expanded on our respective ideologies to create the teaching philosophy, elaborating on what kind of teachers we want to be and the dynamics and atmosphere we want to cultivate with our students. 

It may seem like an unnecessary thing to do, but penning your objectives proves extremely helpful in planning the specifics and actually performing in class. It keeps you on course even when you have to stray from the outline, keeping in mind the essence of your objectives. It helps build and retain confidence. In fact, many teaching posts even require you to submit a teaching statement along with the application. 

What comes next is the script, i.e. the course design. Syllabi creation takes on different structures in different organisations and class levels. It takes some getting used to. 

Tiza Tasneem Tarannum, a 27 year old who has been teaching at the nursery and kindergarten level for three years, talked about the unique lesson book maintained at Maple Bear School, Gulshan, Dhaka. Lesson plans comprise themes – class objectives, activities and evaluation are shaped accordingly. "What did the children learn from my class? Were they able to grasp things easily? Who had difficulty and how can I help them overcome it? We have to observe these factors and update the lesson plan accordingly each week," explained Tiza. 

In general, the skeleton of a course design includes the course title, its objectives, a tentative schedule corresponding to the topics to be covered, names of textbooks and other materials to be used, class rules and regulations, and a breakdown of the marking scheme. 

We had some fun designing our courses in the Teaching Practicum at NSU. Asked to think of a topic that we feel passionate about, each of us came up with a handful of unique and exciting classes. I planned a course rubric on "Character Building and Self Development through Harry Potter," aiming to show 12-13 year olds how enjoying Harry's adventures can build empathy and other valuable traits. One of my classmates who works at a bank designed a course to teach bank staff foreign language skills, inspired by her personal experiences. Through it all, it's most important to keep in mind your audience – their age, their background and their interests – and design the course accordingly. 

An essential aspect is time management, which brings in the related concept of improvisation. Things will go wrong; you'll have to think on your feet – preferably without letting it show – and adapt to the situation without wasting any time. One of the girls in our class had planned an activity for us that involved listening to a song. The speakers naturally betrayed her just when she turned them on. We did the activity anyway because she sang it for us instead. Her spontaneity, in fact, improved everyone's performance. 

Actually conducting a class takes up a longer time than when you plan it. By the time you deal with the many unanticipated tangents the class can go into, you'll find the bell ringing before you've finished your topic. Letting a classroom of kids see you freaking out over time management and unexpected questions is possibly as excruciating as getting bullied. "I always have to be prepared to answer even the most ridiculous questions", said Phabliha Nusaiba, a 24 year old law teacher at South Breeze School, Uttara. "Since my students are teenagers, dealing with their silly and mischievous questions is a daily struggle. I cannot under any circumstance give a wrong answer. As law is a very vast subject, there isn't a correct answer but a series of possibilities," she explained. 

As students ourselves, we know our teachers would be shocked at the disturbing variety of distractions while we're pretending to be paying attention. It isn't as fun when you're at the other end of it. The answer, obviously, is to be creative enough to hold students' attention, which can actually be just as fun for the teacher. We've all had our fair share of that one favourite, cool teacher to know what I mean. One of my favourite teachers acts out the dialogues with hilarious expressions while reading the text, and we hang on to his every word amid fits of laughter. This is in a 400 level undergraduate class. 

Honestly, the technicalities can be searched up online – it's about as mindless as reading aloud from a script. What can't be taught overnight is how to make students want to learn; that has to come straight from you. It's up to each teacher to keep their audience in mind and grab their attention accordingly. Personally, I believe showing a keen passion in the subject itself goes a long way in getting others interested. Moreover, when students feel respected by the teacher and think of him/her as one of them, they'll want to learn what s/he's trying to teach if only to know why the subject excites the teacher so much. 

Classrooms are changing in our country even as we speak. More and more instructors are realising that practical activities and allowing the students to communicate with each other work drastically better than forcing them to listen to droning lectures. The process is helped tenfold when teachers have a good rapport with the students, guardians and the teaching community, all of which provide unimaginable support in catering to students' needs. 

October 5 was World Teacher's Day. It brings memories of the many cards and heartfelt notes we've written to some of our favourite teachers over the years. They stood out to us because of their sense of empathy, passion and the ability to make us want to listen to them instead of secretly playing hangman on our notebooks. Some of them made us want to not bunk classes – they were the truly magical ones. We can't all be a Remus Lupin, or have a class cheer "O Captain, my Captain to us", but we can try. I imagine it must be seriously cool to receive that much respect.