Teachers

School is not preparation for life, but school is life – John Dewey…sadly I concur with his quote when Iam just couple of years away from my 30’s. The average human mind is always yearning for "what next?” instead of enjoying the present and thus I used of dream of ‘college days’ in school and ‘of earning money’ in college and so on ‘life’ goes on…

Each year as the “teacher’s day” rolls by, I do a memory jog of teachers I have encountered and their effect on me and before I reach a stage where my memory goes corrupt, I thought of putting this piece.

Already I have lost memory files for 1st to 5th class comfortably spent in a rather small school. All I can recollect is stern ms. chaya singh for social, ms. indu for science and affectionate mrs. talwar. For 6th onwards, I moved to a ‘big’ school whose prospectus promised a swimming pool, the kids have only seen monsoon pools. With change in school and friends, my marks plummeted like bse only to rise during the finals. Amidst my alternating current marks graph, flocked in and out various teachers.

Math was my nemeses and so were the teachers. The first teacher was a stout, chubby and cheerful vandana dayal who later went to Bangalore. She was one teacher who always wanted us to be ahead of the other sections. Next one was ms. saraswati kulkarni and I always entertained the thought that she was a south Indian married to a kulkarni due to her good English and more stress on ‘is’ which went ‘iiiiiisssss’; thankfully it was not ‘hisss’. Mr. vijay taught us the Xth course and I must acknowledge that he, realizing my phobia for the subject, took special interest in me, brought me to the first bench and taught me. And then came the disciplinarian mr. sunil saxena (head of disciplinary committee) with funny English accent “hey! You over there” (trying to ape english actors). Vectors, differentiation, derivatives, integrals, differential equations, 3D geometry, lp, probability appeared like douglas jardine’s bodyline series. I finished my 12th math paper in one and a half hours flat and spent the rest of the time staring at my friends who were working furiously. I had this gut feeling that I would flunk for sure but to my surpise I fell 3 short of my glorious half-century. The credit obviously does not go to mr. saxena who only knew to shout and slap kids.

Hindi was taught by mrs. rupam, another strict teacher who once pounced my hair for not producing the homework copy. I had never maintained any homework copy for hindi and came up with a new copy for each homework. Thankfully, I opted for sanskrit in ninth.

The school had good English teachers and in particular mrs. rohini jakati, ms. padmaja, ms. amita and mrs. sahai . All of them had a cheerful disposition and truly enjoyed teaching. I am indeed indebted to mrs. jakati for she had kind words to say about me in parent-teachers meeting despite my flunking in social science and maths (this was in 6th). She explained to the class the difference between ‘can I’ and ‘may I’. There was this youngish teacher, whose name I cannot re-collect, who used to chew bubble gum while teaching. Overall, English teachers were cool. One particular incident I must refer to; unhappy with my marks, I had tore my answer sheet. My select friends followed my act. mrs. sahai soon called each student for bonus 3 marks and she was pleasantly surprised to see torn sheets and said that she would be keeping them as mementos.

The science stream teachers were mrs. prema swaminathan, mrs. archana trishal, mrs. ram rakhyani, ms. prabha. Mrs. swaminathan and ms. prabha were the best of the lots. Also there was a male teacher for physics who always used to circle the girls side, perhaps trying to improve his chemistry.

Social science as a subject interested me and ms. praveena bhatnagar was largely responsible for inculcating interest and love for history. She was very meticulous about correcting home-works and each copy was returned with pages full with red corrections. She not only suggested answers but also framed sentences. She deprecated the practice of copying and described this as “licking another’s vomit”. Our class protested and cried when another teacher was appointed as our class teacher in her place and we pooled in money and gifted her some imitation (this was in class Xth). I must thank her for lucidly explaining the world wars and contemporary history especially the concept of “tunnel vision” associated with world war. The love for history still survives in me and I continue to read on. There was another history teacher, ms. sapna singh, who taught us in 6th or 7th class.

Sanskrit was never my forte and this was another subject wherein I used to pass only in my final exam. Two teachers were very good – mrs. rekha kapoor and mrs. suman sharma. The third one from gorakhpur – mrs. savita srivastav was a misfit. Her dressing sense exhibited “matching concept”; if pink was the saree, so would be the color of her lip-stick and her sandals. In the end, utterance of “suuar ke bachon” (swine's kids) undid her.

Mrs. naveen bhalla was our accounts and business teacher for 11th and 12th class. She was also our class teacher. She came out as a very good teacher and gave her 100% to explain us various book entries. The accounts class indeed turned out to be a chaotic one and we really enjoyed. She was also creative in manging students - she made dull boys sit with the intelligent ones and for a change I was recognized as an intelligent one. I was one of the “lord of last benches” and mrs. bhalla tried hard to re-settle our group, implemented desk-rotation but we flagrantly disobeyed and remained rooted to the last bench. She gave us a sense of liberty which we were to enjoy in college and in that sense her handling of class 12th assumes importance. Sadly, she too left the school after one year of our leaving.

Economics syllabus was interesting, especially in 12th and mr. shaji george was newly appointed to teach us the subject. His class was funny because of his typical malayalee english accent. He soon busied himself in teaching us graduation level economics. He only used to dictate his notes which I used scribble like a madman so that I could not read it afterwards. Tired of dictating, he delegated to a girl who used to record in tape so that students could hear them in walkman.
The miscellaneous teachers happened to be our games teaches – mr. negi and d.k.bose. mr. negi was quite popular among students for his antics during the prayer session. ‘D.k.bose’ was simply altered to a hindi tantrum. The music teacher was mr. manish khullar and I still remember his tight slap during bongo practice. He used to claim that he was the hummer in parachute ad. And then there was this bald yoga teacher, mr. zutchi. I had never seen him teaching yoga and he used to pounce upon hair of students, perhaps due to inferiority complex. I have only a faint memory of computer teacher, a fair and youngish (perhaps Bengali) teacher. Electronics which came in “some useful period wasted (supw)” was taught by a sardarji who used to loose his cool during afternoons, no offence intended.

I still abhor my big school structure but I still remember couple of teachers with sense of gratitude.