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Contents
My First Major Mistake as a Writing Instructor
My Abusive Past
When I was growing up in Bangladesh, I received beatings off and on from my schoolteachers for not being able to keep myself up to the task. We had to do lots of rote-memorization (Freire 72). In my primary school, we had a teacher who appointed two of his class student-representatives to ask us subject-related questions. He would sit on his chair and would do nothing. For example, the class representatives would pick up every student and then ask each of us questions; let us say, about geography. Their question would be something like, “What is the capital city of the USA?” If we had failed to give them the accurate answer, they would have reported it to our geography teacher; followingly he would beat us mercilessly. As a 10-year-old, it was too much for me to fathom. In many cases, my teachers were what Paulo Freire would call “depositors,” promoting the “banking concept” of education (72). His pedagogic approach was brutal. It took me many years to come out of trauma.