When I was in high school, my English teacher told us this fascinating story of India’s electrification drive in the 1960s. The government sent armies of electrical engineers village by village to bring what would be a disruptive change - light after dark.
And it wasn’t easy because electricity was a newfangled thing and understandably, village elders regularly resisted what the 1960s equivalent of WhatsApp (hearsay and gossip) told them - this was a scary bit of technology that was dangerous.
Apparently, some of them would say - “We heard that electricity is hot and things can catch fire”. As one might imagine, Indian languages did not possess the vocabulary to describe the movement of electrons through conductive materials back in the day.
But the electrification teams had a playbook to deal with these kinds of doubts. They would respond - “No no, this electricity for your village comes from Bhakra dam, where it’s is produced from river water that originates in the Himalayas, so it’s cold, not hot”
When he said that in class, I remember many of us laughing at the ignorance of village folk in rural India, and our English teacher raised his hands and told us - “I didn’t tell you this story so that you could laugh at someone who doesn’t understand electricity”
Teaching, he continued, requires, first and foremost, the ability to communicate an idea to someone else on their terms, in a way they can understand. Teaching isn’t about some blind adherence to intellectual purity or factual accuracy.
Insisting that your student understand what you are attempting to teach only using what you believe is the correct framework or the appropriate metaphor is not teaching - it’s an exercise in vanity.
To teachers who patiently explain things from first principles at the level of the student's understanding day in and day out for mostly pitiful compensation, Happy Teacher’s Day, and thank you for truly bringing light to darkness.
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