Skip to main content

Teaching



Teacher was very fond of parrots.  They keep repeating A, B, C... And when they grow up they repeat s = ut + ½ at2 or sin2 Ɵ+ cos2 Ɵ = 1.  When they grow up more they keep repeating “Yes, sir; Yes, madam.”  That’s why Teacher decided to take over the caged parrot from his cousin who was leaving the village to settle down in one of the posh apartments in Delhi.   The cousin had just won the Lok Sabha bye-election. Teacher was not characteristically ignorant and so he knew that keeping birds in cages was against the law.  Love does not follow laws, however.

Teacher was very upset when Parrot spoke.  It did not speak the formulas.  Instead it uttered expletives. 

Teacher decided to teach Parrot.  “A, B, C...” Parrot said, “AAP, BJP, Congress...”  As if that were not enough, Parrot added some expletive to each word it uttered.

Teacher presented the problem to Counsellor.  Every school must have a counsellor, according to CBSE, so that students learn formulas right and become doctors and engineers.  Otherwise they may become politicians.

“A serious problem, sir,” agreed Counsellor.  “Let us try behavioural therapy.  Deny Parrot food until he repeats A, B, C, and give Parrot Shahi Paneer when he repeats A, B, C.”

It worked.  Parrot learnt to repeat A, B, C.  But the problem was after getting Shahi Paneer Parrot would utter expletives more vigorously than it ever did.

“Try cognitive therapy,” counselled Counsellor.  Since Parrot was brought up by Politician, its attitudes must be reformed.  Cognitive therapy changes attitudes.  Explain to Parrot why its attitudes are wrong and which attitudes are right and how wrong attitudes distort perception and wrong perception distorts truth.

“Truth is you are a terrorist,” said Parrot when Teacher explained attitudes, perception and truth.  “I’ll get you killed in a fake encounter.”  And the usual expletives followed.

“Parrot knows the supreme formulas,” concluded Counsellor.  No therapy required.

Teacher fulminated against the formulas outside the syllabus.  He grabbed Parrot, walked into the kitchen, opened the freezer of the fridge and said, “Traditional therapy for you.”

1, 2, 3 ... Teacher counted the seconds.  He knew the formula of how much time a parrot of a particular body mass could stay inside a freezer under its normal temperature and pressure given the velocity and acceleration of the parrot’s wing flapping in a given volume of space.

“I’m sorry,” said Parrot when Teacher liberated it from the freezer.  “I won’t repeat my fu..ing mistakes.  But tell me, what did the chicken do?”

[Note: Not an original story of mine.  Adapted from one I read somewhere some time.]







Comments

  1. that was Satire-e-Khas! loved it. Coming to counselors my school counselor was so good that he rid me of Anxiety Neurosis and taught me self counseling. I was so inspired that I took Psychology as my second majors. But again I was laughing on reading the ending

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. A couple of my old students reminded me of this story which in the original version has a military officer in the person of the teacher here.

      Glad you liked it.

      Delete
  2. Ah... a light as well as a very deep read :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've always felt life is just like that: light and deep at the same time.

      Delete
  3. in the beginning I felt you were talking about my daughter as she is literal parrot. Not the ABC kinds but whatever her teacher says is right. She is currently in the mode where her teachers know the most and are placed even above God. In between I started enjoying the post and the counselling techniques used. Totally freaked out and loved the ending. There are tears in my eyes now and my jaws are hurting from laughing out so loud.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Athena, as I'm completing almost three decades of teaching I've seen all kind of students. In fact, there's one class that's the opposite of what you've mentioned: a class that thinks they know better than all teachers. It's one such student who provoked me to write this.

      Delete
  4. That's a new angle, I always felt teachers knew more than us.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...

Hindutva’s Contradictions

The book I’m reading now is Whose Rama? [in Malayalam] by Sanskrit scholar and professor T S Syamkumar. I had mentioned this book in an earlier post . The basic premise of the book, as I understand from the initial pages, is that Hindutva is a Brahminical ideology that keeps the lower caste people outside its terrain. Non-Aryans are portrayed as monsters in ancient Hindu literature. The Shudras, the lowest caste, and the casteless others, are not even granted the status of humans.  Whose Rama? The August issue of The Caravan carries an article related to the inhuman treatment that the Brahmins of Etawah in Uttar Pradesh meted out to a Yadav “preacher” in the last week of June 2025. “Yadavs are traditionally ranked as a Shudra community,” says the article. They are not supposed to recite the holy texts. Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. That was his crime. The Brahmins of the locality got the man’s head tonsured, forced him to rub his nose at t...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...