Skip to main content

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

 

Comments

  1. Excellent post!! You have put it rightly.... after passing over anyone hardly remember what was taught in schools..but they do remember the teachers...and the of some teachers remains throughout life

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.” Albert Einstein

      Delete
  2. Oh I loved that line...
    Students hardly remember what you teach them once the exams are over. They remember what you are...
    I'm going to use it someday. Credits will be duly given. Happy teacher's day to you!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The concept is really not mine. Some great writer said that, I think. Glad you liked it.

      Delete
  3. It's beautiful post sir. And I do agree with you about teachers. Teachers good thing always remember to the student. That's why we can say that one good work always remember.

    ReplyDelete
  4. It's beautiful post sir. And I do agree with you about teachers. Teachers good thing always remember to the student. That's why we can say that one good work always remember.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Prelude to AtoZ

  From Garden of 5 Senses, Delhi [file pic] Hindsight gives an unearthly charm and order to the past. There can be pain too. A lot of things could have been different, much better, if only we possessed the wisdom of our old age back in those days. As a writer put it, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and a lot of those guys must have thought, “I wish I had known this some time ago.” Life is a series of errors with intermittent achievements. The only usefulness of the errors may be the lessons they teach us. Probably, that is their purpose too. We are created to err so that we learn, I dare to put it that way. I turn 64 in a month’s time. It’s not inappropriate to look back at some of the people whom life brought into my life so that I would learn certain lessons. No, I don’t mean to say that life has any such purpose or design or anything. Life is absurd. People come into your life as haphazardly as vehicles ply on your road or birds poop on your head. Some of these people change the chemist

Why I won’t vote

From Deshabhimani , Malayalam weekly Exactly a month from today is the Parliamentary election in my state of Kerala. This time, I’m not going to vote. Bernard Shaw defined democracy , with his characteristic cynicism, as “ a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve .” We elect our government in a democracy. And the government invariably sucks our blood – whichever the party is. The BJP and the Congress are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee though the former makes all sorts of other claims day in and day out. BJP = Congress + the holy cow. The holy cow has turned out to be quite a vampire and that makes a difference, no doubt. In our Prime Minister’s algebra, it is: (a+b) 2 which should be equal to a 2 and b 2 . There is an extra 2ab which is the holy cow. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm , the animals revolt against the human master and set up their own nationalist republic. Soon politics develops in the republic and some pigs become leaders. The porcine

How Arvind Kejriwal can save himself

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have a clear vision. Eliminate all opposition. Decimate them or absorb them. My previous post [link below] showed a few people decimated by them. Today let’s look at the others: those who are saved by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]. 1. Himanta Biswa Sarma  This guy was in Congress and faced serious charges related to the multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam. He also faced corruption charges related to drinking water supply in Guwahati. His house was raided by the Central Bureau of Investigation [CBI]. Then he switched over to BJP and all his crimes just vanished. It’s as simple as taking a dip in the Ganga and all your sins are forgiven. Today he is the chief minister of Assam. Nothing is heard of all the charges that were levelled against him. 2. Amarinder Singh  This former Captain in the Indian Army was a Congressman until Modi’s Enforcement Directorate [ED] started raiding him, his son and his son-in-law. He put an end to all those raid

The Good Old World

Book Review Title: Dukhi Dadiba and irony of fate Author: Dadi Edulji Taraporewala Translators: Aban Mukherji and Tulsi Vatsal Publisher: Ratna Books, Delhi, 2023 Pages: 314 If you want to return to the good old days of the late 19 th century, this is an ideal novel for you. This was published originally in Gujarati in 1913. It appeared as a serial before that from 1898 onwards in a periodical. The conflict between good and evil is the dominant motif though there is romance, betrayal, disappointment, regret, and pretty much of traditional morality. Reading this novel is quite like watching an old Bollywood movie, 1960s style. Ardeshir Bahadurshah, a wealthy Parsi aristocrat in Surat, dies having obligated his son Jehangir to find out his long-lost brother Rustom. Rustom was Bahadurshah’s son in his first marriage. The mother died when the boy was too small and the nurse who looked after the child vanished with it one day. Ratanmai, Bahadurshah’s present wife, takes her

Kejriwal’s Arrest in Modi’s Kurukshetra

For some mysterious reason, Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest reminded me of Haren Pandya. Maybe, because Pandya’s 21 st death anniversary is approaching (26 March). Have you forgotten Haren Pandya? He was the Home Minister of Gujarat before Narendra Modi assumed dictatorial powers in that state. Modi chose to teach humility to Pandya by making him the Minister of State for revenue. Pandya chose not to learn humility from Modi and resigned from that post in Aug 2002. Remember Gujarat of 2002? You should. A fire engulfed a train on 27 Feb 2002 killing 58 Hindu pilgrims who were returning from Ayodhya where they had gone to discover their god, not very unlike Christopher Columbus undertaking a voyage to discover India and messing it all up. What caused the fire in the train? Lord Ram knows probably. The upshot was that there was a riot in Gujarat by Hindus against Muslims. Haren Pandya is one of the BJP leaders who gave statements in many places indicting Modi for the riots. He asser