17 June 2026
It was in January 2008 that I was first asked this by a parent : Will you teach my child the English ‘subject’?
I write the word specifically in quotation marks for I hope it tickles your attention. For at least one of you to shift your glance back up and counter question : Wait a minute – shouldn’t the word you are looking for, be…’language’?
Right from my own schooling years, I have observed this funny insistence of our education system of converting the romance of the language into the monotony of a subject. A crossover that doesn’t hesitate to break a sentence into Subject and Predicate but fails to teach the objective of this segregation.
It was in January 2008 that an 11-year old stood beside her mother and boldly declared that she absolutely hated the English subject. Her candid outburst sparked a curiosity within me – could I be someone who eliminated her fear of the subject and made her befriend the language instead?
Being a teenager myself back then, I was confused on how to proceed. I had “passed out” (a unique Indian English coinage!) from the same teaching system – how could I turn it on its head for her? We couldn’t challenge the syllabus, we couldn’t cancel the exams – but we could change the approach. Grammar concepts came alive as we gossiped galore but always in English; listening skills developed through exposure to English movies and radio; word registers improved by playing various vocabulary games. The subject bowed down to us eventually – and the mastery over the language pulled in the high scores.
Over the years, I have customized teaching plans for a variety of students, adapting to the weaknesses they still (thankfully!) honestly declare. But a month ago, a 10-year old walked through my doors and once again shook all my concepts to the core.
His eyes sparkled intelligence yet we couldn’t proceed to converse in English any further than the response to a very basic question – What is your name? I tried similarly simple questions; each of which he simply answered with a blank stare. Here was a boy who was almost the same age as my first ever student back then, here was someone who was also learning English as the main medium of instruction. If I had to differentiate between the two, it was unfortunately going to be on their financial backgrounds. But here was also a boy who could also easily identify the pictures of hedgehogs and badgers (despite not knowing how to pronounce these words) because he regularly watched Peppa Pig and Paw Patrol episodes!
Privileged or not – it seems like the educational system had failed them both decades apart, for its insistent focus on memory more than mastery. I flipped to his earliest textbooks and was left confused – despite having not one, but two degrees in the very same ‘subject’.
The Std. 1 textbook expects children to read aloud dialogues and small stories. The Std. 3 textbook is where phonics are actually introduced! How then can a 6 year old be expected to read ‘apple’ without being able to associate the /a/ sound to the particular letter?
The answer is simple really : The child isn’t expected to decode this. The teacher is.
A teacher reads aloud the words, the children parrot those sounds back. A teacher dictates, the children’s pencils fly over the page capturing words into atrocious spellings. A teacher writes on the board, the children try to win a race against time as they copy it all down before a duster wipes it all away to make space for the next lot of notes.
The syllabus boxes keep getting ticked, the children move to the next class but the learners in them are left behind. Eighteen years later, the flaws are even more evident. But the remedy still remains just as simple.
With my 10-year old student, the textbooks have been kept back inside the bag. There are no dictated answers and this teacher has the patience to wait out his understanding. Together, we question the whys and hows of the language. His pencil now lingers on each word, thoughtfully weaving it together into a sentence that might be short but is sensible. We move from the familiar to the unknown, at a slow but sure pace. Every day we take three steps back, but at the end of that same day, we have also moved forward.
We have decided to let the language win this round…because the subject itself is still up for discussion!