Our social and emotional growth happens while we are in a social setup. As an intrapersonal human being, I have always found social set ups stressful. What should be the compass to direct social situations that also keep me connected to my true nature? As a teacher, I am a guide but what about conversations where we are equals, such as colleagues? I hear about empathy, the ability to understand and feel the other’s feelings and experiences (Tomlinson & Murphy, 2018). This is truly a transformative space. However empathy may lead to taking up the other’s experience into one’s own being and that leads to exhaustion, especially if you are a sensitive being. Hence compassion, feeling others’ feelings without taking them into oneself (Tomlinson & Murphy, 2018) sounds more like a true north to follow. The goal is to humanize the work we do by understanding and learning from one another in ways that lift our work. (Tomlinson & Murphy, 2018). Lifting our work would be the key.

This gives me a compass to connect to myself and others, especially students. Compassion is to understand what the other is going through. A lot of individuals who talk of empathy or compassion use it as another means of indoctrinating others. I need to save myself from it. For this, I take help from Maslow’s approach (McLeod, 2020) which is that all human beings are in a state of becoming. If that is the case, then to hold a person in a patterned formation would be not of much use. The other thing I get from Maslow is knowledge of where a person is at a time of interaction for we are fluid and move between stages in different contexts. Being compassionate would tell me where the person is and respond accordingly depending on the person and not my theories.

In teaching middle school, I would change my teaching to user-based learning and not theoretical-based learning. A number of examples can be found for the same by (Kochar, 2010). My main focus would be to be vigilant enough to gauge what a child or a group of children are feeling and respond accordingly to them. For example, if my class is afraid of a topic, taking it further for those using coercion would not be useful or helpful. Being compassionate would be to notice the fear and act by a judicious change of strategy. I would adopt the AAA or adapt, accommodate and adjust mode for teaching. This is when you are more focused on the child’s readiness to learn and not on the pressure to finish the curriculum. In the adult world, I would be focused on the adult’s coaching need and not push my thoughts on him or her (Tomlinson & Murphy, 2018).

About the author

Monica Kochar started her career as a Maths teacher in 1993. She has years of experience as a Maths Curriculum Designer with leading education platforms. This write-up has been reproduced from ' Humane Maths ' with the Author's consent. Any views expressed are personal.