At my first school, along with the usual stuff, we would also be taught to enjoy school, and the learning process itself. Teaching nursery rhymes and correct use of language were considered paramount.
However, when a friend of ours who was a regular poor performer failed an exam, his father chose to console him with, “It’s not your fault, beta. It’s your teacher’s fault for not being able to teach you well enough.”
The former US President Barack Obama had once said: “If you want to make a difference in the life of a student, become a teacher. Your country needs you.”
How true. Five decades after passing my SSC exams, I am reminded of some of our teachers who stood taller than was required, to touch the lives of thousands of earnest, curious, rearing-to-fly students like me. They enriched us with true education – on matters within the syllabi as well as beyond them, teaching us to be better and more useful people and citizens. They were always ready with well informed answers to the multitudinous questions we’d shoot at them every day.
One of the things that fascinated us the most was learning idioms and proverbs. Among the earliest we learned were: ‘A friend in need is a friend indeed’; ‘All’s well that ends well’; ‘A stitch in time saves nine’, ‘Honesty is the best policy’, etc. A little towards middle school brought forth ‘Simplicity is beauty’ (this one takes a little maturity to genuinely understand and appreciate). And then there was one, ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it too’!
In the 6th standard in an essay assignment, I had written a sentence, “I will then be able to defeat my enemies.” My teacher advised, “You are too young to have ‘enemies’, child. It is too strong a word. The words ‘opponent’ or ‘competitor’ would be better.” ‘Simple advice’, one would say? Hardly. I would blare a trumpet and announce: ‘What a lesson! What a teacher’.
We were also always encouraged to be meticulous about correct spelling. Our Economics teacher taught us the difference between needs, wants, and luxuries, which seemed just mildly interesting at that time, but now they help us to define and shape our life’s priorities. Our History teacher caused quite a flutter when she explained that there is such a word as ‘peoples’. It is used when we refer to the people of different nations.
Once, at our boarding school, a teacher beat up a fellow student so badly his nose and whole face became puffed, swollen, and bruised black and blue. Now, this was a private school, and the teachers – especially the native staff – were on the job only till the Principal’s pleasure. Our medical dispensary Sister, just an ageing, qualified nurse, was also one such staff member. When the beaten student went to Sister for treatment, she was absolutely appalled and outraged and immediately reported the erring teacher to the school Principal, and even threatened to report this violence to the police. “I won’t have my boys treated like this!” she protested, in a shaky voice.
She could have been sacked instantly, but wasn’t, thankfully. She was popular for getting along well with all ages of students and hence was liked by us. And by taking this firm, decisive stand this meek, mild, vulnerable lady had educated us on something important: ‘Don’t ever be afraid to stand up for the right things.’
My children were in ‘one of the best schools of the city’. When they occasionally narrated what they’d ‘been taught’ each day, it would worry us parents no end. Their English teacher taught them to spell ‘sandwich’ as ‘sandwi-T-ch’. The Environmental Studies teacher taught them that hand-pumps are found mostly in ‘urban’ areas, when actually it is a rural phenomenon. Then she marked all the students’ exam answers wrong, and announced the ‘urban’ to ‘rural’ correction in class only after causing loss and confusion to the students.
The math teacher said 10 divided by 1000 in decimal form is .001(!). Another teacher couldn’t fathom that the word ‘manmade fibres’ in a lesson meant ‘fibres made by man’ and not some fictional ‘munn-maa-dey’ fibres, as she had taught. In a lesson from ‘Adventures of Tom Sawyer’, the book had wrongly printed, and the teacher ignorantly taught it as such, that Tom would sneak looks at his girlfriend Becky ‘out of his eye’ instead of ‘out of the corner of his eye’.
And one teacher taught my ward that a soldier has made the ‘supreme sacrifice’ for his nation when he loses an arm or a leg in war.
Temporary teachers, themselves poorly educated, and manning most of the teachers’ posts in our unaided schools today, is one scourge. Another one is that even in government aided schools, teachers whose jobs are ‘confirmed’ as ‘permanent’, stop bothering themselves to exert any more effort than is required to keep their jobs. And then, we read about government-run schools with no basic amenities – not even separate classrooms, or teachers, or a proper roof on the building.
Coming back to my childhood friend’s father who told him that his teacher was at fault, his quip could have been more correct today. And Mr. Barack Obama, if he could see what our schools are doing, would on hindsight, say: “become an educator” instead of just, “become a teacher”.