Skip to main content

Class struggle



Sometimes, when the students in my writing class toil over their assignment (though toil may be an extreme description of the level of engagement, sometimes!), I decide to take a mental walk with my own words. A couple of weeks ago, this is what resulted:

You walk in,
the world on your shoulders
and in the undependable ink
of the whiteboard marker,
you're ready to deliver it,
spell it out,
deconstruct
and analyze it,
so that they can pick up the pieces
and fit them into a jigsaw
of their own desires
and motivations
(parentally fed/denied/rebelled against).
There are alternative words
for ambition
that escape you,
as your gaze flits
from furrowed brow
to glazed eye
to drumming fingers
and snapping ball point pens.
Perhaps that's too strong a description
for this pressure--
a heavy, blanketing, blinkering
cloak--
they wear to the classroom.
The world stays on my shoulder
but it feels different,
lighter, made less serious
by the skeptical minds
that have beheld it
for the better part
of two hours.

22 September 2011
Labels:

Comments

Reef by any other name said…
Recently,I was telling a friend about how I landed up taking up your subject/paper during M.A.It was a second choice,but I cannot even imagine how much I would have regretted not being in your class ma'am.

It was one of those classes,where I wanted to do my best for each assignment.I didn't just do them with a word count in my head(Yes,I admit,I did that for a couple of other classes during the M.A).

Thank you for the patience with which you made us realise what we could do with words.I wrote before taking your class,won essay competitions too,but I learnt more things about good writing in your class than I ever did before.
9:57 AM
Usha Raman said…
Thanks, Amulya! Good to know that what I enjoy doing makes sense after all!
12:55 AM
Post a Comment

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...
2 comments
Read more

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...
3 comments
Read more

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 ...
2 comments
Read more