Imparting Wisdom
Fr Michael Eather arrived in
Seduced by the beauty of logic, he decided to study primary school teaching, and turned his mind to the task of devising the perfect teaching method for mathematics.
'It was fascinating. Just fascinating', he says. 'You know, so clear and so logical. There was a reason for everything.'
He refined his teaching methods, then spent some years training teachers how to use his 'Modern Method' for teaching. However, a great surprise awaited him when he was sent to Tundtoli, a northern village in
To Fr Michael's consternation, the children, all of them Adibasi (indigenous peoples, treated very badly within the caste system), did not respond well to his imparting of logic and wisdom as he had thought they would.
'I had to come up with a better way to teach them', he remembers. 'Since the dawn of time, teachers have blamed their students, if they did not like them, for their lack of achievement. But I knew I had to find a way.'
Deliverance from this predicament arrived in the form of fellow Jesuit Fr Bill Dwyer's visiting sister, Sr Margaret Dwyer, who introduced him to the Myers-Briggs typology system, a way of learning about people and the way they work and learn, based on a detailed questionnaire and consequent categorisation.
Through this process Fr Michael was able to redefine his approach to teaching and interaction with his students, so he could accommodate the more intuitive and sensate way of learning that the children displayed.
'I really loved those children,' he says, remembering. 'They thought they were useless, while I thought they were the cat's whiskers. You had to be terribly careful; they were so sensitive. Then I had to find out ways to teach them in such a way that they could overcome their fear and get some self confidence.
'I prayed that they would grow to see themselves with the same love that I saw them. I don't know if I ever succeeded. They got a bit of self-confidence, I guess, but there were various tricks you had to use in teaching self-love.'
In 1993, Fr Michael was sent to serve as Headmaster of Xavier College in Hazaribag. This was a different context altogether, a school for the wealthy and privileged.
'It was about 6 months before I could get the image of the Adibasi children out of my mind', he recalls.
There have been plenty of moments of joy and silliness dotted throughout his colourful career. It was in 1984 in Tundtoli that he gained one of his more widely embraced nicknames: Headmistress.
'There was a group of sisters running a school close by. I was obliged to fill the role of headmaster when the headmistress took ill. However, the principal stamp read headmistress, and was never replaced! So even now, among certain circles, I still hear "Oh! The headmistress has come!"'
After a two-month stay in
By Jane Ryan
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