There is a world of difference between engineering and commerce batches at the CAT (Common Admission Test) coaching centre. Engineering students respond enthusiastically to Math classes. Numbers, algebra, geometry — these are their hideouts from life’s abiding dailiness. Commerce batches, on the contrary, come alive in English sessions. Talk of graphs and pie charts is inane chatter to them, but bring up the difference between au fait and au courant, and their limbs shiver in glee.
Since I teach English, I find the engineering batches rather taxing. They are good at logic, so classes on critical reasoning run just fine, but language and grammar stump them. The other day I was supposed to teach homonyms (words that sound similar but mean different things) to three different engineering batches back to back. Worried that I would simply pass out from boredom, I thought up different scenarios to grab students’ attention. I could tell them a story from my time at Indian Institute of Management (this seems to work always) or I could make them feel a little better about being engineers (this is advisable: engineering, if you haven’t noticed its ubiquity, is an increasingly dead – not to mention deadening – qualification).
As it happened, the classes turned out just fine. Teaching, at heart, is performance. A good teacher doesn’t only know the stuff he talks about but is also appreciably theatrical. One reason why teachers survive repeating the same thing day after day is the novelty they inject into each class.
While the homonyms we learnt at school (week/weak, read/reed) are decidedly unsophisticated, CAT requires students to understand the differences between “impudent” and “imprudent” or “complacent” and “complaisant”. Students, even when aware of these words, haven’t used them in conversation and, therefore, tend to commit errors.
One question in the exercise I handed out in class was this: “In the late afternoon, the bluish hammock/hummock of Mt Singleton shows in the far distance”. The answer is “hummock”, which means a hillock. Most students marked “hammock” out of familiarity. Some of them knew what it was, the others had a vague idea, and still others looked at me blankly when I said: “A netted swing that is suspended between two trees on a beach.”
I drew it on the board for them. I drew two trees, in that particular style that Indian students learn in childhood, with the branches drawn only upto a certain height beyond which they vanish into a thicket of leaves. The leaves themselves are represented as a bouffant cloud in the white space above the branches. I am no artist but they understood. I decided to go a notch further. I told them a story.
When I was a child, my drawing teacher made birds in the sky as “v”-s with the stems curved. Evidently, these were wings. I did not understand – or know – this. I saw my teacher’s illustration as tick-marks, and that is how I drew them. First gently, and then with broad strokes so that my birds looked fiendishly disproportionate. I put this down to my secret desire to make tick-marks, hundreds upon hundreds of them. The red swoosh in my notebooks was a sight of such wholesome contentment that I was willing to latch on to any opportunity to jot those tiny wonders on paper.
Consequently, my birds looked less like birds and more like winged creature with a debilitating disability. One wing utterly small, the other stretching into the distance. My drawings of mountains with a smiling sun emerging from them and of huts with curvaceous roads leading upto their doors were cluttered with birds. What was meant to be a rural idyll looked like a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s menacing film. But I was overjoyed.
Not my teacher. I failed the exam, and had to sit for the test again. It was great fun. I was very fond of my art teacher and I suspect she was fond of me too, and she explained to me where I had gone wrong. It was disappointing to have checks (pun intended) enforced on my blossoming creativity, but if my art teacher, with her long braid and slender hands, had asked me to roll in the rubbish heap, I would have done so cheerfully.
As I recounted this story in the engineering batch, my students smiled. Some laughed. Others concentrated on my face (and not their notes or the white board) for the first time. The class had come alive. My breathless rendition, replete with diagrams on the board and arms flailing about in excitement, was born of the anxiety I felt at the class slipping into death mode. Fortuitously, students reacted as I had expected. I may be imagining things, but they were all ears after this slight detour into fantasy land.
The author has switched too many jobs in the past and hopes he can hold down this one
