I have the fondest memories of my school days and my teachers. Who doesn’t? What I am today, a major influence has been the teachers who shaped the way I think, the way I react in situations, the way I perceive the world. I have been fortunate enough to be trained by teachers who taught by example.
I remember this incident in school, where in a large group I was asked the reason for my absence in the previous choir session. I replied that it was due to cough (I pronounced it as Kuff). After the session, my teacher took me aside and corrected me saying that it was “Koff” that I was suffering from and not “kuff”.
Lesson learnt for life: You don’t correct people in public. Period. If you want to appreciate someone, then choose a public forum. Praise people when you have an audience. For anything else, one on one is best.
And not like they treated us with kid gloves. They knew how to keep us (a naughty, restless bunch of over-excited kids) on track. One of my favourite teachers was famous for spanking errant students with a wooden footrule on their behinds. Solid, huh? And the best part was that that the whole class got it. There was a lesson to be learnt here as well – One for All, all for one.
She was my favourite though for another reason –she taught geography and made it the most interesting and colorful subject. She taught the concepts in such a simple way that anyone who learned in her class could never forget them. I remember when she was teaching us about relief features, the analogy she gave was of the nose which is a relief feature on our face. Tough to forget something like this.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles was the standard prescribed text in Class VIII. The novel came to life when our English teacher took us through the pages. We could picture the dreary, desolate moor, (the setting of the novel) and the hound became a scary phenomenon that could send a chill down our spine every time we thought about it.
Our teachers were our icons. They were all exceptionally brilliant with their own subject. Not just academics, they were our ideals when it came to the ideal behavior, personality or their dressing sense and we loved to follow them. God bless my teachers, some of whom are connected thanks to facebook. Thank you for shaping us and moulding us.
Sometimes I wonder how they could be so selfless and totally involved with the students and bringing out the best in them. Whether it was curricular, co-curricular or extra-curricular, we were encouraged to explore our potential in every field. Especially when I compare them to modern day teachers. One of my son’s teachers (a middle aged lady with Bollywood ambitions) had the audacity to tell me that I should ask my husband (who was working with a leading television network) to get her a break in TV or my child’s education would be impacted.
Happy Teacher’s Day!
