Teaching or Interacting?

Whenever I attend classes and fulfill my teaching duties, I ask myself: Am I teaching or interacting with real humans who have needs and problems?

I also use such mental probes to my advantage to come down to earth, put my ego armor down and be natural and human when teaching and communicating with students.

Looking at teaching from a distance, it doesn’t necessarily mean you are senior or you know lots of information. But rather it reminds us how forgettable and arrogant we can be at times. It inspires us to learn, open our minds, collaborate with others and accept our flaws and imperfections.

When talking about teaching and interacting, you see inter-related approaches used. Teaching is out-reaching where you provide content, express it and deliver it in the appropriate way possible.

Coming to interacting, its merely the core where we use our soft skills when communicating with students. It is using our informal skills and the day to day interactive habits too.

So to answer this question: teaching or interacting?, I see it as a combination of both. One way where we enrich the students with knowledge and information. And another way is two-way communication where we encourage an open dialogue with students to ensure the relatability of our content to the students’ context and backgrounds.