What are words worth?

Thirty years ago, an orange-bannered tabloid made its way quietly into the mailboxes of a few hundred teachers and the desks of a comparable number of principals and librarians. It got put into the folders of workshop-attending teacher-educators and book-buyers. It had a set of ambitious goals: to create conversation among a largely ignored constituency, to spark a sense of agency and a can-do spirit in a tired profession. Around twenty years ago, the two-tone masthead turned full colour, but the driving force remained the same. And a little over a decade ago, the tabloid morphed into a slick folio-sized magazine. Still the goal stayed constant. From its point of origin in the Hyderabad corporate office of Orient Longman Ltd (now Orient Blackswan) to its rocky mid-years in the sun-filled home office of Spark India to its two-roomed operation in my home, some things about Teacher Plus have not changed. It continues to keep a focus on the teacher, that person who is responsible f...

Sometimes, when the students in my writing class toil over their assignment (though toil may be an extreme description of the level of engagement, sometimes!), I decide to take a mental walk with my own words. A couple of weeks ago, this is what resulted: You walk in, the world on your shoulders and in the undependable ink of the whiteboard marker, you're ready to deliver it, spell it out, deconstruct and analyze it, so that they can pick up the pieces and fit them into a jigsaw of their own desires and motivations (parentally fed/denied/rebelled against). There are alternative words for ambition that escape you, as your gaze flits from furrowed brow to glazed eye to drumming fingers and snapping ball point pens. Perhaps that's too strong a description for this pressure-- a heavy, blanketing, blinkering cloak-- they wear to the classroom. The world stays on my shoulder but it feels different, lighter, made less serious by the skeptical minds th...

Three books, a dozen teachers, two expert voices, and a brightly painted room. The result was an hour of reflection and enjoyment, an escape into a space we had forgotten existed. Our own pleasure in the magic woven by words, the ability to travel into experiences not our own, and the possibility of discovering empathies--if not answers--in these narratives. When we at Teacher Plus were wondering what we could do to make the day special for our own community of teachers, we hit upon the idea of a session where teachers would turn listeners--not for the purpose of taking ideas back into their classrooms but to rediscover the simple pleasures of listening to a good story. The books we chose were simple, easy to obtain volumes that told stories that, despite their varied setting, were universal in the themes they addressed: boisterous classrooms, distracted students, difficult teenagers, and the never quite defined aims of education. But these themes were not wrapped in polemic or a...