Chapter 2
It was back in 1949 in New Delhi that I took my first teaching job and found that it was very enjoyable and rewarding for me to be a teacher. I had as my students a group of twenty 13 and 14 year old girls who had very little or an inadequate knowledge of English. One of my jobs was to bring them, within two school years — with about six hours a week given to the teaching of English — up to the high school level in their competence to speak, understand, read, and write English as a second language. My strength as a teacher did not consist of my knowing how to prepare these students to prove themselves as knowledgeable in English, but rather of my interest in them as persons and in finding out how effectively they could manage to do things that needed to be done. For this reason I watched them at work instead of pushing them to do things to please me. My efficiency as a teacher did not lie in my awareness as to how my students learned or in what ways I needed to teach them so that they would learn better, but in an unspoken understanding between them and me which had to do with our effort together to get in touch with our potential to accomplish the task set before us. In this they were my equal. In the course of time as I would notice the rapid progress these young ladies were making in their grasp of the English language, somewhat amazed, I would ask myself: “What makes it work?”
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