What being taught, taught me about teaching
English is not my mother tongue. I grew up in times where a person’s worth and place in society were largely judged if they could show off with a whole sentence in English.
In school, I was daunted by it. Never much of a reader, most of my library cards were a huge nothingness. I didn’t like the idea of reading beyond the academic curriculum.
I was ashamed of my writing skills. Every vacation I would pledge to read the English newspapers religiously to improve. Some of my classmates were avid readers, they were finishing volumes of Harry Potter and discussing their latest novel discoveries while I was mostly disconnected and bored.
I got by, donning my mediocrity beautifully. I wrote boring essays and marveled at those who got their articles published in the prestigious school magazine.
A time came to write the exam for senior secondary school. In India, they are called board examinations and a matter of life and death in a highly competitive social setup. These exams determine the glory or shame you will be put through in your family and social circles. The scores will determine whether your mother will hold her head high in the next neighborhood aunties meet or she will batter yours and make an excuse to not go.
Family entitlements rested on these scores. Mark sheets of heroically performing cousins were proudly displayed at marriages and birthday party meets while the parents of not so meritorious quietly absconded the conversations in shame.
As I prepared relentlessly for this upcoming battle I left English aside to devote time to the more important subjects. I’ll deal with it later I thought. As it happens with most things that are left to be dealt with later, I never got around to it until one night when panic struck.
Tempest — a play by Shakespeare, Great Expectations — a novel by Charles Dickens and Immortal Stories curated by Ruskin Bond for the English Literature exam. Essay writing, report writing and whatnot writing for the English Language exam all stared at me like displeased aunts.
My mother felt my disheveled nerves and promptly asked one of her friends to help me out. Ms. N Bisht. She was a stalwart English teacher for senior sections in our school although I never had been taught by her. I had heard she never needed to refer to a dictionary because she knew each word in it at the back of her hand.
There was a certain quietness in her demeanor. She spoke softly and her words were measured. Thin and poised she had a sharp shooting gaze. The kind that would make one want to crawl under a blanket and not ever come out. Once a student accidentally ran into her and blurted out “Shit!”.“Every time you say it your mouth is full of it”, she had said. Shit no longer sounded so cool anymore.
So I found myself in her garden one morning with Shakespeare, Dickens, and Ruskin Bond sitting nervously in my bag. Greeted with a warm smile and a hot cup of chai it’s not that bad as I imagined, I thought. She handed me some written notes and we talked.
She asked me who I thought was the hero of Great Expectations. I didn’t know. I didn’t think the matter required an opinion from me, the hallmark of mediocrity. The protagonist is always the hero right? No, turned out I was wrong. Joe was the hero. We talked about Joe that morning and chartered through the whole novel through him.
Every day I would walk up the mountain to her house, not minding the bitter chill of the winter morning. I would look forward to it in a way. The huge cloud of fear and diffidence that loomed over me was beginning to part.
In hindsight, it is difficult to remember the details of how she helped me prepare for the exam but I remember being asked a lot “What do you think?” In none of the other subjects, it mattered what I thought. My whole school life it didn’t matter what I thought, so I had taught myself to never have an opinion.
I witnessed what had shifted inside me, in the examination hall, while writing the English language exam. For the essay writing, I described a bustling market scene, in absolute detail. A market I had never been to or scenes that I hadn’t seen myself. I somehow found words to express the figments of my imagination.
The joy writing that essay brought me! Wandering through that imaginary market for half an hour, I had never had the words or the expression, but that day English flowed like a happy stream and I had a good, refreshing swim. It didn’t matter anymore what marks I would score, I had written the best 400 words of my life.
I remember beaming through the Literature exam. Without having to make the effort of cramming up I was quoting lines from The Tempest left, right, and center. God alone knows how they fit in my memory, to date I find it impossible to remember simple things, even names. It was like an external hard drive had been fit into my brain.
17 years after Shakespeare, Dickens, and Bond sat shitting bricks in front of Ms. Bisht I wonder what happened in those 15 odd days. Her impeccable grasp on the language, her vast repertoire of vocabulary, her kindness, what exactly permeated through to me is something I still can’t point my finger at.
On a very indirect, subconscious level, just being around her and observing her, opened gates that lay locked within me for years. Perhaps I would have never have known to explore that side of me that could articulate thoughts into words.
This is what a great teacher can do. Smash the barriers of limitations you wholeheartedly believe in. If you think of the teachers who changed the course of your life you will notice they had a few things in common.
They were masters of their subjects. They knew their shit (I’m not a teenager anymore trying to act cool with slang so my mouth is not full of it)
They were good human beings. They must’ve made you want to crawl under a blanket and never come out but fear makes you listen. You listen when you respect a person’s knowledge and when they are genuinely good people.
Be someone’s teacher. If you care deeply about it, you won’t go wrong.
The hallmark of mediocrity scored a 90 out of 100 that year.
