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.]







Labels:

Comments

  1. Datta GhoshSeptember 8, 2014 at 10:35 AM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 8, 2014 at 1:34 PM

      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. Anunoy SamantaSeptember 8, 2014 at 11:04 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 8, 2014 at 1:34 PM

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

      Delete
  3. UnknownSeptember 8, 2014 at 1:15 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 8, 2014 at 1:37 PM

      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. UnknownSeptember 9, 2014 at 12:33 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  5. Devesh PrajapatiOctober 13, 2014 at 4:55 PM

    good story sir

    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
47 comments
Read more

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...
18 comments
Read more

Dopamine

Fiction Mathai went to the kitchen and picked up a glass. The TV was screening a program called Ask the Doctor . “Dopamine is a sort of hormone that gives us a feeling of happiness or pleasure,” the doc said. “But the problem with it is that it makes us want more of the same thing. You feel happy with one drink and you obviously want more of it. More drink means more happiness…” That’s when Mathai went to pick up his glass and the brandy bottle. It was only morning still. Annamma, his wife, had gone to school as usual to teach Gen Z, an intractable generation. Mathai had retired from a cooperative bank where he was manager in the last few years of his service. Now, as a retired man, he took to watching the TV. It will be more correct to say that he took to flicking channels. He wanted entertainment, but the films and serial programs failed to make sense to him, let alone entertain. The news channels were more entertaining. Our politicians are like the clowns in a circus, he thought...
11 comments
Read more

The Vegetarian

Book Review Title: The Vegetarian Author: Han Kang Translator: Deborah Smith [from Korean] Publisher: Granta, London, 2018 Pages: 183 Insanity can provide infinite opportunities to a novelist. The protagonist of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-winner novel, The Vegetarian , thinks of herself as a tree. One can argue with ample logic and conviction that trees are far better than humans. “Trees are like brothers and sisters,” Yeong-hye, the protagonist, says. She identifies herself with the trees and turns vegetarian one day. Worse, she gives up all food eventually. Of course, she ends up in a mental hospital. The Vegetarian tells Yeong-hye’s tragic story on the surface. Below that surface, it raises too many questions that leave us pondering deeply. What does it mean to be human? Must humanity always entail violence? Is madness a form of truth, a more profound truth than sanity’s wisdom? In the disturbing world of this novel, trees represent peace, stillness, and nonviol...
6 comments
Read more

The RSS does not exist

An organisation that has 80,000 branches in India does not exist legally in any document. This is the cover story of The Caravan this month. By the way, The Caravan is one of the very few publications that still continues to exist in spite of being overtly critical of Narendra Modi and his Sangh Parivar. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is not registered as an organisation under any of the usual Indian registration laws such as the Societies Registration Act or as a trust or company. It functions as an unregistered voluntary organisation, though it is arguably the largest public organisation in the country. This situation makes the organisation absolutely unaccountable to anyone, argues The Caravan . The RSS is not legally required to file annual returns to the Tax department or disclose its financial details publicly though it deals with thousands of crores of rupees every year especially after Modi became the Prime Minister of the country. The membership of the organisat...
12 comments
Read more