PERSONALITY
TREND
FASHION
SPECIAL
CHAT JOCKEYS
ARCHIVES

V Gangadhar

Once a teacher, always a teacher

A teacher is a teacher is a teacher. Even when he is forced to switch jobs, he still remains, at heart, a teacher. Take the example of Manohar Joshi, the chief minister of Maharashtra. He began his career as a teacher, then started a chain of private coaching classes which brought him lots of money. Since moneyed men always eye politics, it was no wonder that Joshi joined the Shiv Sena, became a corporator and a major force in the Sena. When the Sena-BJP alliance romped home in the state assembly polls in 1995, Joshi became the chief minister of the state.

But he always remained a teacher at heart. So much so, he recently started classes in his official bungalow. The 50-odd students were mostly the servants of the state ministers and their family members. Watched by the media and TV camera teams, the chief minister began his Operation Blackboard by writing down simple Marathi words on the blackboard, reading them out and asking his students to repeat the words after him.

Later, Joshi defended his lecture and refuted that it was a publicity stunt. He claimed he was determined to wipe out illiteracy from the state and would meet his 'students' at least once a month. I do not know the reactions of the students. But, as I said earlier -- once a teacher, always a teacher. I should know this because I was a teacher for five years.

My subject was English literature and I taught in a college in Ahmedabad. I loved English language and literature and was thrilled at the prospect of revealing the beautiful works of Milton, Keats, Shelley and Byron to the students. Ah! The magic of Shakespeare, the satire of Pope and Dryden, the wonderful world of Dickens' Pickwick Papers...

I did not know that most students in Gujarat, in those days, began learning English only from standard eight. They repeated faithfully after their teachers. "A phor apple. Apple itle safadjal. B phor Bee. Bee ilte madhumakhi," and so on. When they entered college three years later, they were totally unprepared for Milton, Shakespeare and company.

I learnt this within days of my meeting with them. They sat in front of me, gazing respectfully as I rhapsodised over the beauty of daffodils as described by Wordsworth. I was in for a revelation when I asked some of them to read out the poem. They could not even pronounce words like daffodil. The glazed look in their eyes made it clear that they could not register whatever I was babbling.

Some of the more experienced English teachers solved this problem by explaining everything in Gujarati. I could no doubt converse in Gujarati, but was not competent enough to explain the nuances of The Eve of St Agnes or Ode to the Grecian Urn in that language. But a compromise was needed. The students made it clear that they did not mind their lessons explained to them in kutcha (broken) Hindi or Gujarati. So, the line, "My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky" became "Maaro hriday rainbow ne joyene kudheche."

Sometimes even that was not enough. Some students had to be told what a rainbow was. Since I did not know the exact Gujarati word for rainbow, I explained it as, "Akash ma dhanush... saath rang nu dhanush... varsaat pachi akash ma avache (A bow in the sky... a bow with seven colours... it appears in the sky after the rains)." They nodded enthusiastically and made my day.

Teaching Shakespeare was an ordeal. I had to literally enact the witches' scene in Macbeth. Cauldron was vasan, brew was dava and I did not bother to explain the ingredients of the brew which included lizard's tail, owl's eyes, wings of the bat and so on to the predominantly vegetarian class. But the students enjoyed the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet saying that it reminded them of love scenes in Hindi movies. The frequent disguises that the Shakespearean characters adopted puzzled them and they often raised the query, "Hero khem heroine bani gaya (why did the hero become the heroine)?" And I was back to square one.

Yet I was under the impression I was doing a good job. That is, till the examinations came along. One of the essays I had taught was a G K Chesterton piece, What I found in my pocket, where the author, during a long train journey, spends several boring hours looking at the different objects he had stored in his pockets. The piece was full of typical Chesterton humour. Yet 75 out of the 100-odd students began their answers with the sentence, "One day, Mr Humour was travelling by train. Mr Humour took out things from his pockets," and so on. How on earth did they mistake Chesterton's humour for a character in the essay?

My disillusionment did not stop there. Answering questions from a John Galsworthy play, most of the students mentioned the names of the main characters (Mr Jones and Mrs Jones) as Mr Jone and Mrs Jone. This puzzled me. When I asked for an explanation in the class, the students pointed out that, according to the grammar they had learnt in school, any word ending with an 's' indicated a plural. So Jones became Jone because they were referring to a single individual.

I was flabbergasted. For the rest of my teaching career, I dictated notes to important questions which were sure to be asked in the examinations. The students mugged up the answers and got high marks. I became one of the most popular teachers in the college.

Illustration: Dominic Xavier