What is true balance?

I am an educationist who loves her profession deeply. My work does not end with the school timings but regularly spills over the day and I am happy catering to it.

Very often when people interact with me knowing the presence of my son, the question I get asked most often  is 'How do you balance home and work'? Initially the question would bring in a lot of guilt and I would begin to explain my routine and how all members of family were been catered to and kept happy.

After a few years, the response became  more formal and more curt. It had a 'I don't care a damn attitude of what you think of me'.

With years, my responses are short and crisp. I have accepted that people will ask me this question in the course of the conversation though I have yet to discover true balance and give the desired response.

The question racing in my mind are:  Is there really a true balance? Is time to be be divided equally between work and home? Where do you place qualitative time with the family on your list then. How do you keep everyone happy?

We notice that at different junctions in your life, different set of priorities take over. Sometimes you bend more towards family, sometimes more on your work commitments depending on the prevailing circumstances.

I have realized at the end of the day, no one has asked this question to my husband yet. He too works equally hard if not more. Well,  that topic has a different take on it.

Nevertheless, as  an educator, at the end of the day, it is not the institute but the students who take precedence and they have to be catered to. They become your responsibility and you carry a huge responsibility on your shoulders. You cannot compartmentalize your time, so few things do get sacrificed along the way. If your family supports you, then even the moments of sacrifices could become joyous.

Changed priorities

It is the last day of the weekend and I wake up to a beautiful Sunday morning looking forward to a lovely day. I pick up my newspaper with excitement and the headlines are shocking. An attack in a neighboring country and very young lives lost in another heinous act of terrorism. I move on with my newspaper and I only read news filled with crime and despair. You quietly start mourning for all the tragedy and the day has turned sombre. 

On reflecting, I wonder that as a teacher we have to transact the curriculum efficiently but we have a bigger silent role to play and that of inculcating right values in our students. Every lesson of ours is well thought off and linked to day to day activities to guide students on the right path of life. In fact a good school stands apart from a regular school because of the school's dedication to link academics to life skills. 

So the question most pertinent after observing the current violent scenarios all round the world is 'where did we teachers fail? What did we miss? Did we see all this coming and choose to ignore it? Were we helpless? Were we too caught up with syllabus completion to stress on values? Were the parents ignorant to our pleas to work with their child? Was our value building system considered obsolete by these people? 

If we truly desire to change the future we need to truly introspect the school education system deeply. We need to invest in training our teachers and making them sensitive, we need to empower them, we need to redesign our syllabus and assessment patterns, we need to have stronger parent teacher bonding. We need to make school education holistic with equal stress on curricular and co curricular activities. The government all over the world need to spend a huge amount of the GDP on education and making it mandatory for all students to enroll. Attendance should be mandatory or parents get penalized. Only with firm decisions enforced, will we rise to a brighter future.