Now students evaluate their teachers

University of Pune has come up with a really good scheme to evaluate a teacher's performance. Now the students will be appraise their teachers. Looking at UoP's age, this should have been implemented years before but anyways, it's not late to start a good thing. The VC said that this move will bring in greater transparency and accountability in teachers. I am a bit confused with the word "greater" here because there was "no" transparency earlier. Student is always assessed on a lot of factors be it academical, social, behavioral or anything. However, teachers are rarely applied to such criterion, at least not after they get a job in an institute. There might be factors to be considered in teacher's appraisals, but students were not directly involved in it.

I recently came across a shocking article in a Marathi newspaper that questioned teacher's ability to teach children. It was showing all the statistics of how the quality of teaching is degrading day by day and the possible reasons for it, money and surprisingly decreasing social respect were the most important of them. There were times when a teacher was very much respected, it was until I went to high-schools. I feel very lucky to have some great teachers but now when I go to the same school and see these teachers, I feel ashamed. We used to have some classmates who were notoriously known for some reasons which I can't explain here, these guys are now teaching at my school. I guess, the system is turning out to be so bad that we hardly can expect something from it. I teach a small 3rd standard boy everyday. He is very regular in his classes, does his homework timely, get it assessed from teachers. But when I ask a simple problem, he gets totally lost. His teacher says that he is a good student but doesn't seem so to me. She teaches a class of around 60 kids, you can see how extensively she worked on her students by looking at their notebooks but that impression vanishes the moment you ask something. This is because the students never "understand" a subject, all they do is mug up things and put them on papers. Students are built on foundations and if one does not have it then all we are going to get is a "crowd" having smart degrees but no ability as such. I remember my teacher S.D. Kulkarni Sir who used to teach all classes from A to G ( supposedly "brilliant" to "poorest") and God knows he was liked by every student. That's because he had an amazing knack to get hold of students and create a joy of learning things. I doubt if such thing ever exists today. Maybe all of talented junta get lucrative job offers and no one cares / wastes ( if this is the word they use) his / her life in being a teacher.

Certainly this new scheme has a power to change the things provided it gets implemented with similar seriousness. Students could be very good to get feedback from since they are the ones who knows what they want and what is being offered to them. More importantly the implementation of these scheme should be transparent, if the teachers are willing to change / modify their skills then students should see it from their teaching otherwise this will be just another thing which is "routinely" done at universities. Students also have certain responsibilities, if they are appraising someone, they should have that "level of maturity" otherwise it will be a mess all around. I think such things should be implemented in Engineering colleges also, and what I mean by implementing is "followed very strictly" just like the way it is done in Corporate Sector.