Apple of my eye...

Shiela Nair is a Montessori teacher with more than two decades of teaching experience.

I love children, with their unruly hair, pudgy hands and feet, twinkling eyes and restless energy. Their perspective on life is extremely refreshing and though keeping up with them is a Herculean task, I enjoy it thoroughly. As the eldest in a family of four, I pitched in with my share of changing diapers, soothing irate siblings and making sure that they ate the vegetables on their plates.

Having already acquired hands-on-experience in managing children it was natural to make it my profession after completing a course in early childhood management and kindergarten teaching. During my time this was a diploma offered by many community colleges and classes were conducted in a laidback, homely atmosphere rather than a competitive one. We were taught everything about children right from their physiology, behavioural patterns, food habits, growth patterns, and emergency medical procedures, to teaching basic concepts through the play way method.

I entered my first class of pre-school kids with great enthusiasm and delight. For the first five minutes all was deceptively quite, which gave me the courage to introduce myself and the schedule. Then all hell broke loose. I had one child busy pulling the ends of my sari, even as a loud wail erupted from one end of the class and soon it became a chorus demanding my immediate attention.

My day was filled between convincing a boy that yanking his classmate's ringlets was not a nice thing to do, to making sure that an angelic girl understood that however pretty the crayon looked it was not candy! By break time I had made two trips to the sick room and my once starched cotton sari was crumpled and covered with myriad of colourful stains. I soon realised that wearing light coloured clothes around these young enthusiasts was not the most intelligent thing to do, as their cute fists were seldom clean. By the end of the day, I was informed that colouring outside the lines was much more interesting, and crunching on grains of sand was more enjoyable than eating their daily share of vegetables.

As an army officer, my husband was often stationed in the remotest areas of the country where my skill in handling children came in handy. My experience and education helped me in setting up a balwadi in a village of Rajasthan as well as a community centre for the children. I was able to interact with the local government bodies and convince them to get actively involved in social welfare schemes for the benefit of rural children and also set aside resources for setting up of more day care centres. I found the government officials' indifference appalling and their attitude callous. All kinds of reasons, from unavailability of funds, to a panchayat head curtly informing me that mothers had no business working outside their homes, were thrown our way. It took a lot of convincing to get approval for the construction of the day care centre.

I am happy that this field is gradually receiving serious attention now and has become more professional. I do believe that it is our duty to provide the future generations of our country with good child care facilities and a firm foundation in the fundamentals.

As told to MALINI SURYANARAYANAN