Skip to main content

school and all that

Here's something that came to me by way of a text message from a friend--

Those ‘night outs’,
those ‘midnight coffees’,
those ‘birthday bumps’,
those ‘old torn jeans’,
those ‘late night walks’,
those ‘long chats’, those
‘pinches ‘n slaps’,
those ‘crushes on pals’,
those ‘getting kicked out of classes’,
those ‘struggle for marks’,
those ‘writing on desks’,
those ‘fights with teachers’,
those ‘tears for love’,
those ‘fake project reports’.

Just everything that’s in all of us that’s called school life.

I call it Heaven.


(from Lakshmi Rameshwar Rao, aka Buchamma, August 1, 2006)

Got me thinking about that special space within us called childhood...or as it may be, not so special place, for some. I was myself relatively untouched by major trauma in school, but again, school does mark us in certain ways, for good or bad. For those of us who went to convent schools, there was the dark fascination with the concept of SIN and eternal damnation, and many of us lived in fear that we would never be saved if we prayed (or did not) to any gods other than the ONE we were told gave us the Word. And for others, I'm sure there were different but comparable fears and hopes that were dished out with the daily lesson plans. Ultimately, what we remember from school is more the 'sense' of learning rather than the content. The nice (or not-so-nice) things our teachers told us, the sense of self-esteem that we did or did not develop, the friends we made or failed to keep...these are the things that make our patchwork of memories from school, not the history or geography or science or maths lessons. Those were merely the context within which life happened. And now, as a teacher myself, I find that the things students come back to me with are rarely the debates we had in class, or the questions we grappled with about this theory or that. Instead, they come back with memories of the things we said around our lessons, the smiles, the frowns, that gave them a good or a bad feeling, the talks about life, rather than about the texts that they were required to read. Those are the lessons they keep and take with them, and bring back to me, for me to learn from, all over again. And each time I interact with a person who was once my student (and continues to be, in a way), I am full of gratitude for these moments of shared learning. It's great to be a teacher...it means, always, to be a learner.

And that's a long walk from a little text message that came in on my mobile phone!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A house called Ayodhya

How do words get taken away from you? How do they mutate and reconfigure around entirely new meanings, only weakly related to those that they held when you owned them? And then, through repetition and constant association, they solidify into these new forms, their other histories hidden behind impenetrable layers, where they have not been erased altogether.   I live in a house whose name often elicits a curious look, raised eyebrow, a muffled cough, a judging eye, or even a vigorous nod of approval. But for even the least politically minded, the name is evocative of something. For some of us, it is the wave of negativity, divisiveness, and violence unleashed by the events of a December three decades ago. For others, it may represent the righteous assertion of identity.   But the name etched into the gate pillar, now fading and diminished when compared to the glitzy lettering on neighbouring walls, has nothing to do with the politics of place and claimed heritage. It is a simpl...

Remembering Ja

Ja (right) with Maxine, at the Alternative Network meeting, 2004 I opened the newspaper this morning and way down at the bottom of page five was a small insert in remembrance of an old friend and sometime mentor, Janaki Iyer, known simply as "Ja" to many of us.  I myself took a decade or more to make the transition from "Mrs Iyer" to "Janaki" to a very hesitant "Ja"--the diminutive seemed not to do justice to a woman who in a very gentle and quiet way had touched so many people, young, old, and like myself, somewhere in between. First, the specifics. Janaki was a teacher from start to finish. After many years of teaching in an upscale Bombay school, she moved to Hyderabad and, with an enthusiastic friend, started Ananda Bharati, a learning space for children of migrant labourers, in a small room in the YMCA, Tarnaka. Many of those children went on to join the mainstream school system and complete their secondary education; a few even obtai...

Talking about Talk: a conversation with Sherry Turkle

Credit: CNN Image s The Tang Building sits on the southern edge of the MIT campus, overlooking the river whose grey this autumn afternoon acts as a foil to the gold and auburn of the trees across its wide span. I rush up the stairs to the second floor—I am a minute past the appointed hour—and arrive, just a little out of breath, on the second floor. The corridor is dark and the roomy lobby leading to the room that bears the number I’ve been given is even darker. I check my phone again to make sure I have it right and then venture inside, flipping the light switch and finding a spot on a comfortable sofa. One never feels quite prepared for an interview. Especially when it involves someone who has already been in the media eye over the years, whose engaging commentaries on life in the digital age have found their way to the TED stage and from there into millions of YouTube and Facebook shares, whose books straddle the academic and popular; someone who could be the Nora Ephron ...