All About Teachers

Today is 5th September - traditionally celebrated as Teacher's Day in India. We cut a cake in our lab and that pushed me off the precipice and plunged me into pleasant memories.

Our first teachers are our parents. It's from them we learn language, life skills and even learning. I'm blessed to have had parents who never tired of my curiosity nor did they snuff it out.

I was also extremely fortunate to have wonderful teachers throughout my school life. It would be a grave injustice to any of them if I started naming them, because there were so many. For me, marks were a consequence of my thirst for knowledge. It was much later that I realized the flaws of the education system and how much of rote learning existed. My style of learning is such that I take a very long time to understand a particular concept but once I do, I do not forget the basis of it. Every student has a particular bias towards learning - some are visual learners, some are auditory, some are kinaesthetic, some are a combination of all the three and the best teachers have something for everyone.

Flashes of few memories do beg for my attention. There was a teacher in my fifth grade who assigned me to take tuition for a boy. She would let me not pay attention in class and prepare notes and questions for him. When he got full marks, I was the happiest sun beam on this planet. My mother would applaud my will power when I wrote exams through asthma attacks. It taught me a certain amount of grit. A cheeky disproving of my parents' understanding of eclipses are caused by shadows also resurfaces. I loved every subject from history to physics. That was only possible because I studied under teachers who taught us as stories and not as things we had to remember. In some sense, the story teller emerged as an amalgam of my experiences with my teachers. A teacher helped me overcome my stage fear by pushing me on stage at every conceivable opportunity. Ironically, a teacher's insult of my English catapulted my language skills into another realm and I thank her from the bottom of my heart as well. A teacher really close to my heart dragged me from the depth of depression and made me achieve my dreams.

Ever since I was a child, I wanted to be a teacher. Initially it was because I knew only three careers - engineer, doctor, teacher. A doctor seemed too demanding. An engineer seemed too boring. A teacher seemed exciting. As I grew up, I became more convinced I wanted to be a teacher. For me, it began with clearing doubts. I have seen some glimpses of hope that I may be a good teacher - I won a 'be a prof' event in college, I have dabbled in a few YouTube videos, I have been a teaching assistant with so much of soul satisfaction. I come from a family of teachers on both my mother's and my father's side, so I hope there is some genetic help as well. At the outset I did not realise it, but a teacher's job is as responsibly and morally demanding as that of a doctor. A doctor may save your life but a teacher teaches you to live it.