Teaching Is a Senseful Activity, but We Made It NON SENSE
- From HEI view point
I recently read Prof. Krishna Kumar’s column “The Teacher Is Walking Away,” and it felt more like a cry for help than just an article. He highlighted how teachers in CBSE schools are leaving classrooms due to excessive workloads and bureaucratic pressures that overshadow their true role as mentors and guides.
As I reflected on his words, I realized that a similar scenario exists in higher education institutions offering professional courses like engineering, medicine, and management. This insight inspired me to explore the various factors causing faculty in HEIs to step away from teaching.
To make these factors easier to understand and remember, I framed them under the acronym
NON SENSE.
Teachers are not walking away because they have lost passion. They are walking away because the system has turned teaching into NON SENSE, quite literally.
Let’s decode what’s behind this NON SENSE that is draining the joy, meaning, and dignity out of teaching.
N – NAAC Rankings
- The teacher’s classroom is now an audit field.
- Every lecture is not about learning, but about “evidence.”
- NAAC has reduced education to checklists, documents, data points, and dashboards.
- The teacher spends more time proving teaching than actually doing it.
- Labeling teachers as non-compliant for not meeting unrealistic targets in teaching, research, consultancy, projects, innovation & startups , and entrepreneurship has become a way to control and pressure them.
- Outcome-Based Education was supposed to inspire innovation.
- Instead, it has become a performance ritual. Outcomes are predefined, creativity is confined.
- Teachers teach to meet “outcome codes” instead of cultivating curiosity.
- The irony? Learning outcomes are measurable; learning itself is not.
N – NBA Rankings
- The NBA framework is another ranking treadmill.
- Courses are mapped, but the teacher’s mind is trapped.
- Accreditation should be a mirror, not a maze.
- Yet teachers are buried under forms, reports, and reviews losing sight of the learner in front of them.
- Every semester, syllabi swell like unchecked files.
- Too much to teach, too little time to breathe.
- There’s no room for exploration, no time for discussion, only completion.
- When teaching becomes a race against deadlines, the teacher’s spirit tires first.
- Rubrics, internal marks, continuous assessments - all good intentions gone extreme.
- Teachers have turned into grading machines, juggling endless evaluations, plagiarism checks, and exam duties.
- Where is the space for reflection, feedback, or connection?
- Evaluation is meant to guide learning, not exhaust the teacher.
- The ranking culture has turned education into competition.
- Colleges chase numbers, not knowledge.
- Teachers are seen as contributors to institutional scores, not shapers of young minds.
- Chasing ranks is killing the real purpose of education i.e. Transformation
- Every teacher today carries invisible fatigue.
- Administrative overload, student disengagement, peer comparison. It all builds up quietly and turns into stress.
- When teaching becomes survival, not service, stress replaces satisfaction.
- Teachers who once inspired others now struggle to inspire themselves.
- This might be the hardest truth.
- Teaching survives today only because of the emotional labor of teachers, their passion, patience, and purpose.
- Yet that passion is often taken for granted, unpaid, and unacknowledged.
- Institutions expect teachers to do more “out of love,” but love alone cannot pay the price of burnout.
- We need to bring back the “Sense” in teaching
If we want teachers to stay, we must make the profession senseful again
by restoring Autonomy, Appreciation, and Authenticity.
Prof. Krishna Kumar said the teacher is walking away.
But the truth is the teacher doesn’t want to walk away.
We’ve just made it impossible for them to stay.
Let’s bring back the sense in teaching,
before all that’s left is the NON SENSE.
Crafted By:
Dr. Sanjeev Kumar Thalari is a consultant in Learning – Skills training – Development – Coaching, working at different levels of individual personal and professional development. Having around 23.5 years of industry and academic experience, worked at different levels of teaching and skills training. A Doctorate in Business Management, Master graduate in Psychology, Train the Trainer certified, e-Trainer certified, qualified in UGC National Eligibility Test, Qualified in State level eligibility test of Andhra Pradesh and a certified soft skills trainer.
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