It is a truism that teachers want to interact with the students, get to know them as individuals with unique lives and personalities. At the same time, teachers also bring their unique selves into the class but often feel that they can’t spend valuable classroom time narrating episodes from their own biographies.
Another strange observation about our classroom teaching ethos is that a child may see a teacher listen (sometimes!), speak (most of the time), and read (occasionally), but write only on the board. Students never get to see a teacher write before them in the class. In a system where all examinations are by writing, it is amazing that a child never gets to see a teacher perform and demonstrate the messiness of writing before the class.
Enter the missive, a key feature of The Writing Course, which we concluded this week at ITREB (Ismaili Tariqah and Religious Education Board). A missive is the teacher’s writing -in this case, an open letter written by me as Course Leader, for each class. Since it written afresh usually the evening before, it captures the pulse of the discussion going on and is a written record for all students to refer back to after the Course. It is read aloud in class and commented on for clarifications and questions.
The Missive is topical: it summarizes a key point under study, offers the participants a powerful articulation of a thought that then is available for scrutiny and discussion. And sometimes it mentions events in the City that are uppermost in everyone’s minds and thus is “grounded” in time and space.
Over the years the feedback from the Master Teachers Course (which I conduct every year in the summer) has been that, when they now come upon the missives, they can hear the echoes of the reading and in class, and almost find themselves back in the classroom in a moment of sweet nostalgia.