The college phase

Mahesh has defined acontextual learning in his entry as becoming aware of the tremendous possibilty that anything and everything around us - in short, nothing short of everything is useful for and can be used in classroom and teaching practice. All is context. Except content :)

In my official college life, Govt. appointed, I started by teaching General English in Pre-degree, the equivalent of our + 2 ISC , and General English in B.A. and B.Sc. I also taught literature for B.A. and M.A. It was because of my doctoral degree that I was instantly given the chance to teach at not just the Degree level but the Post-graduate level too. I taught John Bunyan and Samuel Beckett the first year to the P.G's. Many of the new teachers in my Dept. had come from my alma mater for my own P.G and research years , so we had a good thing going in terms of rapport in the Department. Some of us tried an experiment which failed but helped all of us in the long run. It was to start a course in trying to prepare the stidents to write the UGC exam so that they could get fellowships to do M.Phil or Ph.D if they wanted to. We had to wind it up after a few months because the students thought our standards too demanding. But it gave us newcomers the push to not slacken in terms of the quality we were used to in the place we had come from. to stick to being at the cutting edge of knowledge in our field, I mean. We loved the tag of specialists!
I would divide my time in the college into three phases
a.When the Pre-Degree was there
b.After they stopped Pre-Degree classes
&
c.Semesterization of P.G. with introduction of seminars, assignments, student projects and internal assessments.