Teaching- learning and the purpose of participation

Couple of years back when I was in the final year of my graduation, I got a call from the principal of the support school where I used to teach to the economically underprivileged kids, saying that there was a debate competition and he was thinking if the students can participate in it.

I told him instantly that of course students should participate, and also told him names of couple of students who were more articulate and talkative in class.

He paused a bit, and then continued, “The language allowed for debate is English.”

I went blank when I heard this. Since I was their English teacher, I knew that their comfort level with language was nowhere close to that of taking part in debate in English. However, I asked him what the topic was. “Corruption is for the rich, it does not affect the poor much” was the topic. “Students are supposed to participate in a team of two, one for the topic and another against it.

Without worrying of how students would react to it, I thought to take a chance. That evening when I went for my class I put forward this topic to them in Gujarati, asked them to think if they could take any side. Fortunately, they thought, not only did they think but they could also put the arguments in a decent manner. Next, I helped them with some words in English and asked them to speak in English. This was way too much to expect though!!

Since I also had my CAT exam that year, I used to meet them only once a week, so we hardly got a chance to practice twice before the final event, and in both the times they could speak in Gujarati but did poorly in English.

However, it was very clear to me and to them also that our purpose was not to win, we just wanted to see something new, calibrate ourselves, and experience something we never did before.

Some days later, I heard that out of two students who had participated in the event, both could put their point across – in half English half Gujarati- speech in front of a crowd of more than hundred people.

There was a temptation in my mind to prepare a whole speech for the students, and just asking them to mug it up and vomit it out at the competition; however it was only good not to surrender to that. That was the happiest day of my short teaching career as students had learned to think, and express on their own, their opinions were truly their own!!

Today when I look back at this event, I reconfirm the fact upon my mind that the sole purpose of participating in any event or competition is not to win it or see it as an opportunity to add a feather to your successes, but it is an opportunity to do, think, see, feel, something newer which one would have never had if one had not participated.

At times in this race, one tends to put away these important learnings, and focus more on immediate outcomes, however being reminded of the true purpose is always a great thing.

The Teacher - An Excerpt from a Book

A remarkable school teacher

Some times of an evening you might chance to see a frail-looking man, short and short sighted, in a black coat and with a prodigious head, walking along the oval pathway. He is a nation builder,- he has helped to educate two generations. He must still be coming back into the memories of thousands who have forgotten all that they set out to learn at school.

Life has not given Nusserwanji P. Pavri his meed of reward, but that has not dulled the edge of his cheerful debonair spirit. He evidently believes that Dante was right in condemning to Stygian marsh those who had been sad under the blessed sunlight. With all his sure and enormous erudition, he is Modesty in person. He has not produced any book. The result of his labour is not so many hundred pages but himself. The issue of his sustained mental effort is not a volume but a man; it could not be embodied in print, it consists in the living word.

Nusserwanji is a quiet man, not to be easily ruffled or rattled. Patience is an instinct with him. He has the simplicity of the man in Dostoevsky’s Brother’s Karamazov who used to ask the birds to forgive him.

He brought the human touch in the lessons; - it was always a lesson never a lecture. When Nusserwanji taught history facts were brought to life, the dry bones of history stirred, the ages began to masquerade. He conjured up before you the fog at Lutzen and the snow at Towton, the shower of rain that led to the American revolution, and the severe winter of 1788 that produced the famine of 1789 and thereby the French upheaval. You saw Brutus, the norm of republican virtue, extorting 48% interest from a wretched Cypriote community; you saw the lights burning low in the skies and the stage darkens in the middle ages; you heard the din of toppling thrones and the crashing of empires during the first world conflagration.

And never did his vision dim, his grasp weaken or his memory fail.

His learning does not consist merely in the stock of facts – the merit of a dictionary – but the discerning spirit, the power of appreciation and that of comparative criticism. Knowledge is to Nusserwanji the bread of life. He reads as if he were to live forever, even as if he were to die the next day. He inoculated his students with his own thirst for knowledge. He was a precision and a martinet in discipline. To him knowledge could no more be aquired without high seriousness than a symphony could be rendered upon the flute.

Punctuality was with him a passion. You could set your watch, correct to half a minute, by the time he came into the class. His private library was at the disposal of all his pupils, and so were his time and learning. There never was a man more generous in encouragement or gentler in reproach. By personal contact with him you not only learnt something, you became something. Contact with him moulded your character and taught you, in the most impressionable years of your life, to beware of ideas half-hatched and convictions reared by accidents. Only thoroughly good man could be so great a teacher as Nusserwanji indubitably was.

He was unerring in his acumen to scent the latent ability in a student. In that great tempest of terror which swept over France in 1973, a certain man who was every hour expecting to be led off to the guillotine, uttered this memorable sentiment:

“Even at this incomprehensible moment, when morality, enlightenment, love of country, all of them only make death at the prison door or on the scaffold more certain, - yes, on the fatal tumbril itself, with nothing free but my voice, I could still cry Take care to a child that should come too near to the wheel; perhaps I may save his life, perhaps he may one day save his country.” Nusserwanji had this large and inspiring belief in the potentialities of a Kid. He was personally and vitally interested in the progress and career of all his pupils.

Many other things could be related about Nusserwanji from the wide leaved book of memories. The associations of travel fade the incidents of life press so closely one upon another that each in turn is trampled under foot, but one’s associations with a teacher like Nusserwanji remain forever unchanged. He has now retired but the energy of his educational service remains. This soothing thought must have opened a larger meaning and a higher purpose to his daily work. His personal influence has not fallen silent. His pupils will long feel the presence of his character about them, making them ashamed of what is indolent or selfish and encouraging them to all disinterested labour both in trying to do good and in trying to find out what the good is.