Teacher’s Day

 

What makes life really worthwhile is learning. The best remedy for sadness is to learn something, as a character in T H White’s The Once and Future King says. “You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics…” The character goes on. Base minds will tread upon your honour. Small minds will divide your people into we and they. Then they will be made to wage mindless wars. The world is a bad, sad place. There is only one remedy: to learn. “Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust…”

I have been a teacher throughout my working life. Now that I stand at the fag end of that career, I am happy to note that the feedback has always been highly supportive. My students have given me (and continue to do so) enough and more reasons to be happy about the profession that chose me. Yes, you heard right. I didn’t choose this profession. I didn’t want to be a teacher. But I had little choice by the time I finished experimenting with a couple of other options and I glided into teaching purely by chance.

One of the things that sustained me as a teacher is my constant readiness to learn. I learnt something or the other every day. I read voraciously. Even today I can’t let a day pass without reading some pages of a book. At this moment I am on page 368 of The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I started reading this novel a few days back and will complete it tomorrow. The next book is waiting on the shelf: Reality is not what it seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli, a physicist.

I keep learning. Learning is my remedy for the world’s evils. Learning is also what makes me love teaching. The best teacher is the best learner.

But encyclopaedic knowledge doesn’t make anyone a great teacher. Students hardly remember what you teach them once the exams are over. They remember what you are.

When I look back at my schooldays of 1960s and 70s, a shiver runs down my spine. The school was a scary place with cane-wielding, cold-eyed, platitudinous teachers who thought teaching was all about getting students to sit in graveyard-silence in the class except when answers were expected. For both speech and silence at the wrong time, the students got caned rather brutally. “Don’t ever cry,” a friend of mine advised me once, “when they beat you. Tears excite them and they beat you more just to see more tears and be more excited.” But there was also a teacher who beat me until I cried!

But college was a different place altogether. None of the teachers really bothered about who studied and who didn’t. They came and taught and went away. There were a few exceptions. I had a math teacher and a Malayalam (my second language which was compulsory in those days) teacher who took personal interest in students. I benefited tremendously from their attention. I can never forget them.

What I remember is not what they taught. In fact, I don’t remember anything of the coordinate geometry taught by one of them and I don’t remember anything much of the Malayalam literature taught by the other. But I remember the friendly smiles and conversations, the little helps they offered, the prizes I won because of the Malayalam professor’s insistence on my participation in certain competitions… I remember that they reminded me again and again that I did have a heart. They touched that heart.

I have tried to do the same with my students.

I extend Teacher’s Day greetings to all those in the profession.

 

PS. Prompted by Indispire Edition 340: Share one unforgettable and your favorite personal moment with your teacher. #teachersday