Commotion and trooping in and out before the V standard class room. I had joined the St John’s School and had come to attend my first day. The boys and girls inside the classroom were in pell-mell having skipped their desks. The old students were more at ease, playing behind desks, and all running into each other. The new students like me were meek and silent, watching intently or timidly at the proceedings. Suddenly there was a shout and somebody said, “Miss is coming”. Everybody fell into place and as the stout and martinet like Anthony Madam entered, everybody stood up and greeted “Good morning Miss.” What I saw was a lady in her mid fifties. She was wearing a starched cotton sari and she wore her hair in a bun. She had a stick in her hand. As she entered, her heeled shoe made a thick click sound. Though her face was pleasant and calm, she presented a picture of discipline and control.
I had heard about Anthony Madam; her strict, no-nonsense with me attitude. “She could handle the entire school with her stares” they said.
The class room was very spacious with oval shaped, glazed windows flattened at one end. The Miss sat facing us on a high chair, which was placed on a high-rise platform. The entire set-up made us small subjects and somehow it appeared, Anthony Madam was looking down upon us breathing fire.
After the introduction of new pupils was done with, Anthony Madam took out the textbook and started to read out ‘Rumple Stilt Skin’. I remember my Dad had said, the first day at school would be a ceremonial affair and I had come in without any text or notes. I looked into my neighbor’s text and the pictures fascinated me. As Anthony Madam narrated the lesson, I looked at the pictures and imagined the wiry fairy Rumple Stilt Skin running wildly round the fire, singing my name is Rumple – Stilt – Skin. Suddenly the school messenger appeared and said I was wanted in the office putting an end to my reverie. I remembered my Daddy was waiting and we had to buy texts and other things.
Trembling in my feet, I rose to ask permission unsure as to how Anthony Madam would take this. I somehow murmured “Miss. Permit me to go to my house.” What I had never expected happened. With a benign smile, Anthony Madam said, “No my child, say you want to go to your home.” That was my first real English lesson.
In my high school, I joined Boston. In my VII standard we had Jules Verne’s ‘Round the world in 80 days’ for our non-detailed text. Our English teacher Mrs. Vijaya Subramanian was our class teacher as well as our biology teacher. She taught us this text with great imagination, interest and excitement. I would look forward to these classes with eagerness to know about the exploits of Phileas Fogg and Passeportout.
Several other Non-Detailed texts like the Prisoner of Zenda., A tale of two Cities, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Treasure Island, Coral Island, The Three Musketeers and Captain Blood kindled my interest in fiction and forever after, I became attached to stories of romance, thrill and adventure. The English class has to be fun. Our teacher would very often put this into practice. We had “Uncle Potter hangs a picture from Jerome. K. Jerome’s ‘Three men in a Boat’ a veritable laugh riot about a bungling gentleman and his elaborate effort to hang a picture. For this she chose three guys from the class who could nearly fit the description of the characters in the story; portly, smug and benign faced JaiShankar for Uncle Potter and Dayakar and Sridhar for the other roles. The class laughed in chorus and if not for the lunch bell, they would have given splits to everyone. Such was the fun in the English classroom. The importance of role-play in a language class cannot be over emphasized.
I had migrated from a town in Andhra Pradesh (Nellore) to Chennai for my education. The school where I studied in Nellore was a ‘Convent’. The school did provide a footing in English. The teachers spoke English and the sisters of the missionary told us stories from the Bible in English. But this was nothing compared to what children from the city had access to. In my VII standard, I came to know for the first time in my life about something called Comics. Reading Tarzan, Phantom, Mandrake, RicheRich, Asterix and Obelix, and TinTin was a pretty common thing for most of my friends. They would exchange comics, read them during intervals, lunch breaks and also on their way back home in the city bus. We also had war comics, yellow paged stuff about the world war-II exploits of allied soldiers. Children from the city are always at an advantage when it comes to exposure and awareness. I remember my classmates of VII standard in 1979 discussing Steve Mc Queen’s motorcycle stunts in ‘The Great Escape.’ The movie had been released in Alankar Theater. They watched it and discussed it, the prison breaking scenes and the fatal tryst with danger in the end for the protagonists. It was not until 2007 that I could watch this film and only after buying a DVD of the film.
In my +1, we had Mrs. Bhanumathi Gunasekharan for our English teacher. She was an excellent communicator and very fluent in her speech. Her classes were always fun and she would start her class by asking the students to read the text aloud. Her pronunciation was a model to be emulated. In one of the classes, when my turn came, I pronounced the word Nightingale as /naitaengl/. The lesson was The Rose and the Nightingale by Oscar Wilde; a fascinating story about love, sacrifice and materialism. She corrected me to the laughter of my classmates and to this day I remember the pronunciation as it should be /naitingeil/.
These are such instances which might appear insignificant nowadays because of the enormous amount of information being made available by the internet and also the readymade nature of it. But in the days when no such resource or help was available, these highlights or minute observations formed what could be called the cornerstones of an Education. At times I wonder what my education would have been if not for all these interesting and inspired teachers. The leisurely and liberal education that we had received has slowly evaporated, into a frenzied race to master the present and shoot ahead to take stock of the next grade. Teachers are not inventive, any more than what they used to be, but slipping farther into a system of performance, cherry picking and coaching.
One should not be biased towards English teachers when extolling their superior skills for other subject teachers too, can be equally or even surpass the English teachers with their superior skill and fluency. In my graduation, we had Shri P.K. Srinivasan who taught us history. History being one of the humanities has great scope for describing the periods, epochs, features, social and economic life, political strife etc of a people. Shri PKS as he was fondly known, with his linguistic brilliance and sweeping comprehension of his subject taught us Medieval India and Modern European history. A few of his favorite phrases have stuck to me and remained with me as the memorable bouquets of our history classes.
“If France sneezes, Europe catches cold”
“Dead rats for sale” about the French revolution
“Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains” – J.J Rousseau
“After me, the deluge” by Louis the XIV
Such was his power of expression and his felicity with the language that he would bring those incidents and personalities of yore to life, right into the classroom, in vivid and spectacular detail.
Some of the small things in a class generally don’t go unnoticed if the teacher is a keen observer. Mr. Ch. Krishna Murthy our Special English Teacher in my graduation noticed me with a running noise in the class. He asked me what was I doing and I said, “I was sneezing”. He corrected me and said, “It was blowing one’s nose”
Where would we be without our teachers? Inside the classroom, we are part of the magical process of transfer; transfer of knowledge, information and the curiosity to know more. A great teacher can turn “A heaven out of hell” as such, and an imbecile_ teacher could turn a “hell out of heaven.” This is largely because the teacher is the player, the referee and the spectator inside the classroom. Such teachers who realize this onerous responsibility will always be dear to their students not because they are the best, but because they are aware of the process. When learning becomes automated, when teaching becomes extremely professional, when all everybody can think of is only grades and marks, the small details are lost forever, the slow and the simple get submerged in the surfeit of go getters. There the teacher is no longer needed and we could customize teaching and learning like all other “Technical things” of life. When this awareness or presence inside the classroom is lost on the teacher completely, we have a situation which can be replicated anywhere. What is unique becomes the prosaic.
Teaching survives, because there are such teachers who are still a presence. This small piece is a salutation to all such teachers, engaged in this noble profession, trenchantly but modestly, resisting the onslaught of all things crass and banal.