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Inaugural Speech

My very dear friend Sri …………, Deputy Commissioner of our District,

Sri ……….., DDSE, Aalo and everyone assembled here, a very good morning to you.

As is already well known in Aalo now, I am averse to public speaking. The mainreason behind that is that I am a teacher. Every moment of my time and every ounce of 

my energy I plan to conserve in order to be of some use to the children whose

responsibility I have already taken. Anyway, today is a rare exception, as Sri ………… 

mentioned in his introduction. Why? Because this programme is about teachers and their

training; a field very dear to my heart.

We teachers bear a responsibility that is stupendous. I am not sure we all feel it

always and everywhere, but it would be good if did so. It is said that in the Great Britain,

a study was once made about the relative importance of the various professions. When

the well-known critic G B Shaw read about that study and its findings, he summarized it

in his inimitable style saying, “Well, it‟s all very simple. When a lawyer makes a mistake,his mistake hangs six feet above the ground. When a doctor makes a mistake, his mistake

gets buried six feet below the ground. When a teacher commits a mistake, his mistake

ruins six centuries of his country‟s history!” T hat’s how responsible our job is, you see.

I am no trained teacher myself. But I have come to some very simple conclusions

about education and teachers and students by my own study and observations. Each of 

my conclusions has shaken my worldview permanently. I shall share some of them with

you today. Some others I shall tell you as we go about our classes in the days to come.

They may set some of you thinking along those lines.

I believe all teaching is by osmosis. It was Richard P Feynman who said so, and Itotally agree with him. It is possible to pass on to our students only so much love for the

subject as we have. If we ourselves are uninterested in the topic, we can never inspire our

students. No matter how much notes we dictate, we are creating useless fellows by our

teaching process, if we lack a conviction in the efficacy of the subject we are teaching. As

a corollary to this belief of mine, I believe that there is no „tough‟ subject at all. There are

only un-interested  teachers. So, it is our national duty to kick-start an immense interest in

ourselves in whatever subject we wish to teach our students.

Listen to a story.

A man once purchased a pet dog. He was greatly enamored with that pet. Hepurchased lots of good books on how to rear a pet dog, read all of them and patiently

went about doing all those things mentioned in them. In all of them, it said that pet dogs

love cod-liver-oil, and that it was absolutely essential for the pet to grow up fit and fine.

Well, our man brings home a big bottle of cod-liver-oil. He pours some oil onto a large

spoon, catches the dog, splices the dog between his legs, forces open its mouth and pours

the oil into it. The dog pukes out the oil and runs away. The owner is flabbergasted.

Something must be wrong with his pet. It simply doesn‟t love cod-liver-oil. But everyday,

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he did the same exercise. Then one day, while he was maneuvering the spoon into the

dog‟s mouth, the dog jerked strongly, and the bottle of cod-liver-oil fell down and broke.

The owner was now livid with anger. But, he was surprised to see that the dog was

greedily lapping up the oil that had spilled onto the floor, and in a few minutes, it had

licked the whole floor clean!

So, the dog did not hate cod-liver-oil. It just rejected the method through which it

was fed its favorite cod-liver-oil! Do we have a lesson here, as teachers? Let us all kindly

think deeply over it.

I further believe that all learning is by imitation. Students invariably imitate us.

We too have unconsciously imitated our teachers. In fact so unconscious is this whole

process of imitation that it is totally unobserved and unconsciously gets internalized into

our personality. Our accents, our thought patterns, our reasoning styles and skills, our

attitudes, even our likes & dislikes to a large extent are borrowed from our teachers. A

single mistake in me, therefore gets copied by 40 lives in one class in one year, and they

go out into the world, you see! No amount of care is enough when you are a teacher. Thefirst and foremost duty we have as teachers is therefore to constantly strive to make

ourselves more and more ideal. Are we doing so? Let us all kindly think about this.

I once read about a mother, how she was teaching her child. The mother is doing

all her chores at home, while the child, sitting on the floor, is trying to repeat the numbers.

The child has not yet started going to school. And today‟s mothers get paranoid about

teaching their kids everything even before the child has learnt how to play! Anyway, a

similar mother this was and she was teaching her kid the numbers. “One, two, three, five,

six…” the child squeaks. Immediately the mother interrupts, “Hey, what about four?”

again the child has to repeat. This went on for some months. Then the child went to a

school. And there, the teacher learnt that this child had developed a very strange of counting. It went like this, “One, two, three, five, six, hey-what-about-four, seven,

eight...”!! Kids are like that; very plastic; great care is needed in handling them. Any

mistake we make gets imprinted in them, sometimes forever.

A couple of days ago, when Mr. ……… and the DDSE had come to our Mission

to discuss and plan the course-contents of this ten-day training programme, we had a lot

of discussion on Value-education, which is one of the subjects of your training. I appeal

to all teachers present here to give lot of thought to this subject, please. It is one of the

most difficult topics.

Personally I am against making Value-education a separate subject, adding to themisery of the student‟s bulky curriculum. What I mean is, we have to be trained to give

special attention to our daily dealings with kids. For it is through these dealings with us

that they learn and pick-up the values for their lives.

Take for example the universal value of telling the truth. Look around, and you

will see that telling lies is universal, not telling the truth. Why? Where have we gone

wrong? Very simple. We have never rewarded a child when it speaks the truth, you see.

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“Hey, why do you want to go out of the class now?” Supposing the child says, “Sir, there

is a butterfly there, it is very beautiful, I want to see if I can catch it .” What do we do?

Immediately we shout, “Stupid fellow, sit down. I am teaching maths and this idiot here

wants to catch butterflies! I shall complain about you to the Principal.” So what does thechild do next time? Some other day, another boy, or the same fellow wants to go out of 

the class and we ask him the reason and he fibs, “Sir, I have a bad stomach and I want touse the toilet.” Now, do we realize that we ourselves drove that pure child to speak the

untruth, for, when he spoke the truth, he was punished! Do you see our callousness? I

beseech you all to think deeply over this aspect, please.

I wish this programme will be able to give something to each one of the teachers

who have registered for the training. May these ten days bring about a revolution in your

mental set-up. I invoke the blessings of Donyi-Polo on all of us.

Thank you.