Why do we need a student counsellor in every home tutor?
“Are you an intelligent student? Great…you are. So you are giving your 10 boards next year? Ok fine, that is ok. So what have you planned about your high school?”
You answer, “What more to think about there? I will take up Science stream and complete my XI-XII boards. And I suppose my class 10 boards will go well and help me to score good marks so that I can comfortably get a Science admission for me in any reputed institute.”
“Ok that is quite a good plan. So have you thought about what you would like to study after your 10+2 is over? “
“Well I am planning for JEE, IIT and NEET. I am optimistic that I will be able to crack any one or more of them if not all in the worst case…”
“That’s a very great aspiration. You are intelligent and hard-working, so there are good chances for you to make your way through those very tough examinations. But, what do you think, you want to be a doctor or to be an engineer?”
“Don’t know exactly, may be IIT if I can secure a good rank. Else may take up the medical one also…..”
This was one story….Lets see one more….
Tapan was a good student right from childhood. He was almost equally good in all his subjects. Teachers were very happy and optimistic about him. Everybody loved him a lot. At home also he enjoyed a lot of love and support. He belongs to a simple middle class family of our country. His father is a government employee. They were not rich, but not even too poor to continue higher education.
Every middle class parent has lots of dreams for their children. Poors also have dreams. But middle class dreams are more related to education perhaps. And rich parents dream more on their own business and professional success than that of childs’. Because successful people dream less on others and more on themselves. But middle class parents are not that much successful. They earn their living but at the cost of many dreams and many aspirations. They never saw their dreams come true. So they most gracefully pass those dreams over to their next generation.
Tapan was good in Science. He enjoyed Physics and Chemistry. Was not very particularly fond of Biology. But his strong merit was also very comfortable with biology just like all other subjects in the curriculum.
One day in class, the teacher was in a mood to know his students’ future aspirations. Though at class 8 they were too young for that perhaps, but still then also each answer will carry some dream, some aspirations in a nascent form. It took some time to reach Tapan’s turn. All were trying to be most creative in weaving their dreams of life, and that took time for each. But Tapan has got nothing to weave much. Nothing to think about much.
Teacher asked, “So what are the aspirations of our best student in the class?”
“Mathematician !!” …..this was perhaps the most prompt and most dull answer in the class that day.
Tapan succeeded to fulfill dreams….but not the one of his own but those of his father’s. He is a CEO of an international technology giant. He traveled a lot for this, from the IIT to the IIM and so on. Now he is no more middle class. Neither does his father.
Getting a good career is very important in these days of high population, low job and swinging economy. But still I have got one question….do we understand “good career” and “good income” as synonyms? So the equation reduces to something like “career = income” !!
“The career is an individual’s metaphorical ‘journey’ through learning, work and other aspects of life….”
This is according to Wikipedia.
And this is what Wikipedia says about “career development” –
“Career development is the lifelong process of managing learning, work, leisure, and transitions in order to move forward a personally determined and evolving preferred future.”
If career is a journey then there can be a need for a guide. Just like the tourist guide. Otherwise after travelling a long road we can realize that perhaps we have taken the wrong road. And everyone cannot expect to be so lucky to have the privilege or opportunity to walk back the road again to start for the right road. So we ideally have to know and understand from the very beginning that we are on the right road. And it is most expected and usual that you and I would not have a common road to travel and a common destination to reach. If life is different and so does the destination, then the road is also different.
Career counsellor is the person who is the guide in our journey of career. But unfortunately we don’t get one. And we get a lot of advice and suggestions on the choice and decision of career. From teachers to parents, relatives to friends and often even strangers keep advising on career. Well suggestions are welcome. But at the end which path to take?
Teachers are the most authentic and reliable source of information and advice when it comes to studies and career. At least they are expected to be that. But the main problem is different. Very few teachers are actually properly informed and trained to become a reliable career consultant. They may be good at their domain subject, they may be compassionate to students, they may be honest and ethical. But being a good counselor is a totally different issue. It will need some cultivation and may be some training for them to become.
There are so many different career options nowadays. Many are high-paying whereas many are not. I don’t think it is a right concept to consider or choose a career option on the basis of job availability and salary package. Yes it is true that job availability is an important factor in this age of high population and low employment. And salary is also another important variable. I think it is better to take availability and salary as two variables. There are more variables that need to be considered and some of them can even be more important than variables like availability and salary.
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So whatever training and learning are needed to become a good career counsellor, for a teacher the prospects are most perpetual and seamless. They are the first person who are often asked to help for this issue.
Parents are also very important. They play a very vital and multi-dimensional role to their child and his career in respect to overall growth and performance in life. Career is one very important part. So it will always be better if every parent is somehow taught and trained about different procedures and skills of career counselling, then nothing could have been better than that. After all parents are supposed to know and understand their child more than anybody even more than the professional teacher at school or at home as nowadays teachers are with too less time and intention for any particular student.
We will discuss the issue of parents as counsellors in some other article. Now let me get back to the teachers.
Though parents are very important in this issue, still teachers have a lot of advantages over average parents. Let us see some of the advantages of teachers –
Education background
Teachers have the required education background to become a successful counsellor. Parents can also have that, but we cannot expect that from every parent. The education of a parent can vary from very minimum or very maximum. But teachers are all with comparable education levels and quality otherwise they would not be able to become a professional teacher.
Interaction with the student
Teachers are with regular interaction with students. They have to do that for their profession. There is no choice. But parents have choices. They can do without much interaction at all. Or maybe they can have more interactions with their child than his or her teachers.
Understanding of student’s capabilities and affinities
This is perhaps the most important point of being a career consultant. And it is also very intangible and hard. Both for parents and teachers this point can be the most challenging one. Understanding and extrapolating student capabilities and skills are a matter of training in itself. I used the word extrapolating because it is well possible that students will grow and evolve with time, so the career counsellor needs to be concerned about that also, because he is suggesting his future career and not the career of present. So he needs to foresee the future of the student to a considerably reliable degree.
The student capabilities come under different categories, like numerical, analytical, visual or graphical, and so on. Also physical and mental capabilities are to be categorized differently. Creative faculties are very important to be counted. Thus there are many different faculties and each of them have their own measure and index.
We keep talking about IQ tests and so, but that is important in having a rough idea about the intelligence and logical reasoning of a student. But that is not the end of the faculties and capabilities. And even the IQ test is not a perfect assessment of the student’s real mental and intellectual efficiency but you can call it just an estimate.
The teacher teaches the student everyday. They are the witness about his every day academic and other different performances. So it will be much easier for teachers to assess and predict a student conditionally they are trained and equipped to do so. But teachers are obviously enjoying one advantage above everyone, even the parents.
As I have already discussed that teachers have an extra advantage of being the career counsellor of his students. Parents, guardians or any external counsellors have much lesser exposure to the particular student’s day to day academic efforts, struggles and triumphs. So they may lack many vital information and clues about that child. But teachers are supposed to be totally aware of the student’s strengths and weaknesses. He also knows about the motivation of the student as well as his likes and dislikes in different streams and subjects. So this can become a great advantage point for the teacher as well as for the student to communicate and discover the appropriate career options for that particular student.
A professional career counselor can be very expert in communication, can be very knowledgeable in career variables, but his expertise and experience with a particular student is much less than his or her teacher, especially the home tutor.
Yes home tutors are the most exposed and experienced person with respect to the academic journey of a student. They are supposed to know their students better than anybody at least in the question of studies.
School teachers are also very able people in this respect but the problem is elsewhere. In school, every class has at least 30 students on average and in most cases much more than that. And the teacher must be taking many such classes every day. So the total number of students a school teacher handles and gets exposed to are to be counted in multiples of hundreds. So you can easily imagine how tough it becomes to know each individual students’ academic details. And this is exactly the most important reason for giving home tuition to a student.
Home tutors help the student at a very intimate and personal level concerned with his studies, and understand his weakness as well as strengths. He shows him the ways to cope with the weakness and the ways to exploit the strengths.
Coaching or tutorial teachers are also equally capable and supposed to be doing exactly the same with his students. Hence tutorials keep a very limited number of students per batch. But still, home tutors usually teach only one student at a time. So his scope and advantage regarding the counselling of that student is wider than the tutorial teacher also.
Despite these advantages of teachers at various levels we more than often see students are very clueless and confused about their career. Often they follow either their friends’ career or their parents’ career or sometimes randomly choose anything that seems to be giving good monetary yield in the future.
Nowadays it has become a trend to calculate career in terms of monetary return. But as we have already seen from the definitions of career, it is actually a journey that helps us to meaningfully and happily live our life in this world. Our life is itself a journey and career makes that journey more nourishing, enriching, enjoyable and happy. This is what ideally it should. But real life is harsh also, so we are forced to deviate from the line of ideal. But too much deviation compromises the meaning of life and its journey and as a result there are chances that we remain empty at the end despite a huge accumulation of monetary wealth. This is not at all desirable.
These all things are to be kept in mind when trying to figure out a career for ourselves. And this process of career discovery has to be done according to students’ individual customization. Teachers and parents are expected to be capable enough and cooperating to help each of them find their appropriate career.
But often we get loving parents and very knowledgeable teacher as well, but still end up choosing a very wrong career for ourselves. Why is it like that?
The main reason as I think is lack of proper knowledge and expertise of counselling career. Counselling for a sensitive issue like a career is a very complex job with many variables to consider from more than one angle. And also thorough knowledge on the students and their capabilities are required.
Though almost all teachers are expected to be capable enough of these, still they lack a lot to become a good career counsellor for their students. They are good in their domain subjects, they give students the relevant guidelines and information, they are good in assessment of students. But their career counselling is invariably weak and ineffective.
So there is the most urgent and essential need for widespread career counselling training for teachers. School teachers, tutorial teachers or home teachers, every type of teacher are required to earn some career counselling capacity if not much more. There can be courses for parents as well. That will make the career counselling of the teacher more easy and relevant as they will be getting support from the parents. And if all this can happen then students are the one having highest benefits and living happy lives.