Ive always believed that teaching, like life itself, is a performance by a selected few. Not everyone can be a teacher. To perform is to live with ones total being. To live with ones total being amounts to be blessed with grace and a childlike innocence. On yet another level it is experimenting with truth and also a tryst with human relationships.
Ever since I decided to be a teacher and that was way back in mid1980s. Ive been a believer in the notion and practice of interactive method. A class-room teacher ought to involve his students in fruitful dialogues and as such the very class-room situation is a micro participatory universe. The teacher is simply a first among equals with a slight difference: the teacher stands just a step upwards on the ladder of knowledge and understanding, since then only can he/she hold out his/her hand and uplift the one on the lower rung. This said, however, the fact also remains that to teach is to learn twice. And very often during my lectures at post graduate level, while explaining some poetic masterpiece, some phrase or expression which till then had been playing hide and seek with me and had remained in comprehensible and inexplicable, all of a sudden, almost in a flash erupted and unfolded all its meanings and implications. For instance, once I was teaching Coleridges ‘Kubla Khan’, and was almost in a trance sweeping the students off their feet, accompanying them to the eerie land where the Dome of pleasure was decreed. And when I came up the line, “And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever...,” I halted for a moment and then so suddenly it explained itself to me with a convincing answer that not the rocks in actuality but the reflection of the rocks floating in the river had been referred to. A teacherremains, must remain a student for ever.
But the present circumstances are such that somewhere almost under a visionless academic conspiracy, the class-room teacher is gradually losing his importance. Thanks to the Internet and the Google-Guru! And now, ChatGPT and AI! Computer and speedy technology are replacing the human presence and the touch of personality. The case becomes all the more glaring and nearly pathetic in a country like India. On the name of smart classes, the presence of a teacher is being crucified and what sucha smart class can finally produce is just an explosion of information and an insensitive army of clones of computers but not a band of conscientious and caring citizens. Science and technology are no substitute for human touch and personal bonding. A black-board and a chalk-stick—not a much-too smooth white-board and a racing marker—may still epitomize the fine excess of poetry and literature, as they used to do once.

Between the text and the student, the teacher is a catalyst. He is supposed to make the student feel the literary piece not only through explaining but through making it a living thing. To this end, the teacher himself has to re-live the text, he is asked to teach. Then and then only will he be able to come close to the Vedic realization of sanghachhadhavamsamvadhwamsarvomanasijantam... in a class room situation. And finally, the teacher-taught relationship seems to have an archetype in what the Mandukyopnisadsays:

Dwasuparnasayujasakhayasamanamvrikshamparshisvajate...
Anuraag Sharma