When I Ponder on Pedagogical Glees and Blues

 

It was June 2012. I was spending holidays at home in a slightly carefree way. At that time my workplace was located in Dhaka. I took leave from my office for some days for personal reasons. A few weeks earlier I had submitted my curriculum vitae (CV) at a private university in Sylhet a bit casually for the post of Lecturer in English Department. I had no special attraction for teaching career.

To be very frank with readers, I have never been much serious about my corporate life though my past and present colleagues often praise me for my hard work which is really very nice of them despite the fact that I am not exactly sure whether I deserve this compliment. Anyway, in the middle of my holidays one fine morning I received a phone call from that private university where I had sent my CV.

They informed I would have to sit for a written exam and a verbal test too and conveyed the date and time. I spoke to my family superiors to seek their advice whether I should attend the job test at that university. They suggested me to face the exam saying that teaching English would not be hard for me as I had accomplished my university education in English language and literature.

I showed up at that private university according to their schedule to attend the written and verbal tests. To my pleasant surprise I did quite well in both written and verbal tests and was selected for the job. I was asked by the authority to join their university at my earliest convenience as a Lecturer in English Department. The idea of switching from a totally different job to pedagogy stirred a little excitement and stress in my mind.

I started presuming in advance what it would be like to speak to numerous students on lingual and literary subjects inside classrooms. As I joined the university officially in the middle of June 2012, first I had to meet the Head of English Department of that university of that time who assigned me with four courses to deal with.

I still remember I entered the classroom as a teacher for the first time at 8 am in the morning on a momentous day in June 2012. It was quite a large batch of students. All of them were looking at me with eyes full of curiosity trying to judge me by glancing over my appearance. I was lucky enough that it was one of my favorite courses which I was assigned to teach them.

The name of the course was American Prose which consists of essays by some of the American authors I like most-Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Fenimore Cooper. It was more delightful to learn that the students liked my lecture which they told me at the end of the class. 

It emboldened me and boosted my confidence. This is how my teaching career began with a cluster of enthusiastic, vibrant and cordial students of that university who have etched longstanding marks on my heart with their love and respect for me.

I always encouraged my students to read extracurricular books besides the textbooks named in their syllabus. Moreover, I all the time advised my students to go through textbooks from first to last pages which would be very helpful for them to grasp the relevant ideas and stories comprehensively. But it was quite tough to finish all the textbooks within a period of just four months as each year comprised of three semesters in most of the private universities around us. A former student of English Department of that particular university is perennially knotted with me who is a “She”.

Fortunately or unfortunately I have been away from full time teaching for several years. But my departure from teaching could not snap my affectionate ties with my students. They are still caring enough to call me up over cell phone. They also meet me when they visit Dhaka. They stay connected with me through social networks too. Till today it's a blissful thing for me to answer their queries on books, research works and different academic matters.  I miss my teaching career for just one reason and that is my students, nothing else. While I was a teacher nothing gave me more pleasure than interacting with my students. My students are the light of my life.

 
Mahfuz Ul Hasib Chowdhury
is a contributor to different 
English newspapers and 
magazines