Yesterday

With students of Carmel

Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines.

Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret, I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let us smile to beat that inevitable legacy. 

I was warned an hour later, during the lunch break, by a colleague, that Margaret’s parents would be here tomorrow. She was their only daughter and she cried at home if anything went wrong at school. The parents wouldn’t bear her tears.

I was concerned particularly because I was entirely new in this school. But nothing went wrong. On the contrary, Margaret began to smile in class. And she smiled a lot after that. On the parent-teacher meeting day, her father told me that I was her favourite topic in their dinner conversations. Her parents were happy with the changes happening to her. Two years later, when Margaret completed her schooling and was going abroad for higher studies she met me with her father and a lot of unforgettable smiles.

Carmel school gave me a lot of friends like Margaret. Young friends. The school lifted me up from the depression that Sawan school had gifted me a few months back. 

My heart overflows with joy and gratitude whenever I think of Carmel. It gave me a new life altogether. Sawan under the management of RSSB had killed my soul and Carmel resuscitated it. The credit goes mostly to the students of my first years there. I never came across such sweet youngsters ever again. I can enumerate scores of anecdotes mentioning the names of students who brought me ecstasies in their own unique ways. 

How did this magic happen? I was questioned many times by many people. The truth is I don’t know. I didn’t do anything special. From later conversations with some of the students, I learnt that I was the first teacher to give them total liberty in the class to ask anything, to express their views openly even if they were diametrically opposed to mine, to go anywhere beyond the text if they so wished, and to smile a lot. And I appreciated them generously for whatever good thing they did. Appreciation was something I had learnt from Sawan.

The Covid pandemic altered all that, however. Classes went online and my efforts to engage students in debates and discussions were all in vain. Students were hesitant to speak out in front of their parents at home. Many of them preferred to visit certain websites instead of attending the classes. Some of them played games online during the classes. The pandemic caused an intellectual mutation among the students.

When the classes restarted at school after a year or so, I realised that the mutation was not only intellectual but also cultural. The students didn’t know how to behave in a class. Most of them had become insensitive egotists. I struggled to get my old personal chemistry back. Or a semblance of it. Some kind of a rapport with the students. Nothing worked.

Teaching is primarily a relationship. Especially for literature teachers. You can’t present Keats’s religion of beauty to your students unless your students can relate to your own concept of religion and your love of beauty and your admiration for Keats. A line like A thing of beauty is a joy forever will fall flat in a class whose Martin and Margaret have never even stood in awe before a rose, let alone touch the Keatsian heaven’s brink.

My classrooms which used to be my ecstasies now became my agonies. I discover Martin doing math one day in my class. I ask him why he is doing that. He says, “You carry on, I’m not disturbed.” The teacher is a potential disturbance to students now!

When the classroom became a place full of ‘I’s, I quit teaching. With a heavy heart.

What do you miss most now? A friend asked the other day? The classroom, I said. But I know I can’t return to the old classroom anymore. The mutation that has happened is not transient.

But I remember the yesterday of my career with a lot of fondness. The school kept me there for four more years after the official age of retirement. The principal asked me to stay on for another year. He is very different from most priests I know. The colleagues at Carmel were all wonderful people, extremely friendly and cooperative. Particularly those in the ‘Plus Two Staff Room.’ I take all that goodness as the bonus I received in the twilight of my career, a benediction that will stay with me like a soothing balm till the end. 

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