A very touching and relevant article on Teachers and their professional needs

The following is the opening few paras of the article found in the link below:

Vijaya teaches in a school that has one other teacher and 65 students. Every one of her days is a whirl. When you have so many children around, uncontrollable spirits take over. In the classroom and outside, you lurch from minor to major crisis and flow from small to big joys, while trying to keep it going. She loves all this, she loves her job. But she feels isolated.

The other teacher is cordial with her. While they run the school together well, they never really converse. In the school they have no time, every minute taken up by the demanding tempo. And with an hour’s commute back home, they are both in a hurry to leave as the school ends.

Her educational background is in the humanities. Even now, after 15 years of teaching, she struggles in teaching math, which she has to, in the primary classes. When she became a teacher as a 23-year-old, everything was a struggle. She remembers being intimidated. Her school’s head-teacher was an aloof man, the school had two other teachers. Each of them was caught in the whirl of the school. She knew she needed help from an experienced teacher, but there was no opportunity. The two other teachers would try, but it would all be in the passing. She survived by her tenacity, and learning on her own. Many others survive this phase by becoming indifferent forever...

To read further, log in here at Live Mint: Teaching in Isolation