Teacher's day

Anna and I received some greetings on Teacher's day, 5th September from friends and former students. 

The Teacher's day is annually celebrated to remember late Dr. Radhakrishnan, the second President of Indian Republic. He was an outstanding scholar in philosophy, teacher. statesman, and visionary of higher education in India. In the post-independent India, he articulated the need to create facilities to offer college  education to school leavers. 

Teaching and learning process has changed in in world of information technology. Most people would choose self-directed learning from early in life from the virtual library of information. 

However the fundamentals of learning paradigm would still come from teachers. 

I remember watching these siblings in  the photo in a teaching-learning process. The older sibling was introducing to her brother pictures and their names. I observed five commendable behaviour in their interaction. The older sibling started by asking her brother,' do you want to see some pictures'. In response from her brother, she let him turn the pages and wait for him to ask her to tell the names of the objects in the picture. In between, he started singing a nursery rhyme seeing the picture of a sheep, and the older sibling joined in the singing. Then he moved on to name the parts of the body touching his sister's body. They enjoyed doing this. 

This learning interaction conveyed a process of  openness, enquiry, participation, exploration and application. These are some foundational values in teaching-leaning process. These two children, followed the pattern without having been formally trained into this methodology.

The CHILD to child learning process is one of the most dependable resource at home and school. If only we can give older children a vision of their role as teachers, we would have honoured their natural instincts to be resources for their younger siblings and friends ! 

M.C.Mathew(text and photo)