Humans of Gwalior: Prabha Shankar Pandey
By: Rotaract Club Youth
Tags: Education, Teachers, Inspirational

Humans of Gwalior: Prabha Shankar Pandey

Meet Prabha Shankar Pandey, HoD of Chemistry at Resonance, Varanasi.

Disclaimer: This is the 10th chapter of Humans of Gwalior, an endeavor of Rotaract club of Youth at ABV-IIITM Gwalior which aims to identify ordinary people who pull off an extraordinary amount of hard work. We believe that every stranger has got an experience or a story worth sharing and wish to bring out such stories among the masses which will serve as an inspiration for generations to come.

“Safalta aur asafalta waqt aur sthan me bandhi hoti hai.”

I have been a teacher for the past 20 years now and in the field of teaching, our experience is held in the highest regard. My highest degree of qualification is Masters. Currently, I am the HOD of Chemistry at Resonance, Varanasi. The most influential teachers in my life have been my mother, my father, and my Tauji, Dr. Dinanath Pandey. I am a graduate of Central Hindu Boys’ School in Varanasi. I have never been an advocate of academic certificates philosophically. I strongly believed that if I had a good education then I could lead a good life and this was in my blood (sanskaar) handed down to me by my father and Tauji. My mother who had received her education only till the 4th standard used to learn words in English to teach us. Her dedication towards our education has always served as a true inspiration to me.

I believe that the process of learning and teaching is an infinite one, never to this day have I felt completely satisfied by the way I delivered a lesson. At the end of every lecture, I have felt like there were many possible areas of improvement and this inspires me to work even harder on my next lesson. I have always tried to understand a student’s emotions when it comes to education to understand how they try to grasp concepts. I believe that the so-called last bencher lags behind the academically accomplished students due to a shorter attention span, it doesn’t mean that they have no ability at all. In my opinion, the estimate of a good teacher is determined only by how much of an impact they could have had on that last bench student.

As I started from teaching nursery standard children and progressed upwards, I would like to remark that it was by teaching those younger children that I learned the art of teaching. To teach grown-up children is a cakewalk in comparison to teaching little kids. I remember my first student, a little boy in the fourth standard. I was trying to help him learn the pronunciation of the letter C however, he kept reading cat as sat. It had been 15 days of failed attempts, his mother who had been observing us then directed me to hit him, and it was in her influence that I ended up raising my hand at him with a certain vigor. This incident is now 20 years old and to this day I often feel like apologizing to him. It was my biggest failure as a teacher. This incident taught me to never let my emotions overtake my ways of teaching. After this incident, I never inflicted any form of physical punishment on any of my students regarding their studies.

My guru used to say, “Whenever you meet someone, be your best self and be 100% present in that moment”. When I am in a classroom, I am only in the classroom. When I am teaching, it is the only thing on my mind at that moment. I believe that it is the reason behind the energy that students experience while I teach. When we were kids, we were taught to do all our chores on our own. This is called ‘sehej sharirik shram’. It is the reason why no matter how hard I work, I never get tired.

There is a difference between a successful person and a good human being. If you are a good human being, it is your biggest achievement, you don’t have to be a good engineer or a good doctor and earn lots of money to qualify as a good human being. I feel like it is my responsibility to not only transfer in my students an understanding of science but also a strong character. To this day the students that I remember distinctly are the ones whose personalities stood out rather than those who were more academically accomplished.

Trust me if you are a teacher there is no such thing as profit or loss. Education has no alternatives on the plane of satisfaction. When you can help your student finally understand a concept, you experience a sense of serenity and peace at the level of the mind and soul which is comparable to nothing else for it the term profit will be too small.

“yahī jaanā ki kuchh na jaanā hai so bhī ik umr meñ huā maalūm”.

I feel like everything I have learned to this day is equivalent to nothing, learning is a never-ending process. I firmly believe that we must try to always appreciate our elders and the lessons they give us.

Written By:

Ananya Mishra

Student, IIITM Gwalior