The word ‘teacher’ can go either way: remind of a beloved mentor or a traumatic classroom incident. Depending on your brush with the education system, this is a word to bask in or shudder at. Any abuse or magic that happens within the four walls of a classroom stays with us forever.
Today we look back with empathy and understanding at teachers most foul, who put us off geometry or geography, knowing in our adulthood the limitations they faced in terms of pay and patience back then.
Good teachers, who made friendly eye contact, remembered to call us by our first name, inspired us to attempt public speaking or write essays, don’t need a particular annual day to be remembered. They are a part of most of our ‘pay it forward’ moments, when suddenly gripped by the nostalgia of the difference a grown-up can make when it comes to how we feel about ourselves we, in turn, bring that perceptive listening to someone visibly floundering or in need of a gentle nudge.
No longer in rivalry with a single soul, we spend considerable time summarizing and encapsulating our own vivid and lengthy experiences into intense capsules of pithy constructive advice. Teaching is a universal impulse, offering our own moments of truth, painfully learned, for another's use.
Everyone has tales of garbled joy or grief while talking of student life, a time when marks and report cards were everything. We remember being made to stand outside the classroom as punishment, we remember being caught smoking, we remember being asked to bring our parents because the principal wanted to personally see the people who made us!
Reena I. Puri, executive editor of Amar Chitra Katha, says: ‘I would still have been struggling with Class VIII if Mr Sharma, my maths teacher, had not given me 35 grace marks and passed me in my final exam. The passing marks were 42. He did this with the headmistress's permission, and I have never stopped blessing both for releasing me from the prison of numbers and letting me soar into the world of words.’
Susan Thomas, director of the National Institute of Fashion Technology in Bangalore, says: ‘Teaching, apart from being a job, is also a tremendous emotional investment for life. Perhaps in no other job do you have to look out for people half and quarter of your age and wonder about what they are doing for the rest of our lives. I accidentally became a teacher during my current stint as Director NIFT, even though I am a career civil servant. I consider it to be the one profession every nation needs to get right.’
Mary Roy, who passed away at the age of 89 just four days before Teacher’s Day, elicited much praise in every obit for her activism in the field of education, for modernizing and supplying the system with a soul. Like other centralized or organized institutes, academics can become rigid and righteous. It takes heroes to breathe life into boring textbooks.
Poet Kabir Das put it best when he prioritized Guru over God in this doha:
‘Guru Govind dou khade; kaake laagon pai / balihaari Guru aapke, Govind diyo milai.’
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