A few months back, our grandson through our daughter, 10 years old asked me “ Grandpa, How did you become a teacher ? Or What made you choose teaching as a profession?” . Naturally a difficult answer. For him, it was part of a school project to interview a few persons whom he loves or respects by framing a set of questions by himself and prepare an article on the answers obtained from them. Fortunately, it was a written message which was passed on to me by his mother through a WhatsApp chat. I could answer that at my own time. Obviously, I was at a loss to give an extempore answer. But I had to keep my promise to answer his questions.
To tell you my dear friends, (a sizeable
proportion of them may be my dear
students at REC / NITC) , well, I can only say it just
happened even though I had a
reason for choosing
this career.
To narrate an incident before we
start on my journey, let me
recollect this. About 10 years back,
some of our class mates in T K M College of Engineering Kollam living in and around
Kozhikode where I spent most
of life time decided to have a get together. A few of us
managed to get the address
locations and phone numbers through a difficult
process and decided to meet at a hotel in Mavoor road Kozhikode. As
often happens, I was an early bird at the venue as one of the
organizers While
I was waiting for others to assemble, a
gentleman came to me and addressed
me as ‘ Sir’, and asked me “ Shall
I talk to you?”. I was a bit annoyed as
I thought he may be one of my class mates but
after almost 40-45 years, we could hardly recognise each other. But his addressing me as Sir was annoying or embarrassing and I asked him rudely Why? He was apologetic but explained to me : ‘ Dear Mohandas Sir, I am your classmate, Hussain, I called
you Sir
because you were my teacher
in the final year study leave. I could complete my engineering studies only because of you. You taught me enough to get a pass mark in two
subjects which were very difficult
for me. I could not have
completed my course but for you,”
That was really a compliment and I was very happy and embraced him
cordially, telling never call me Sir,
but please call me
by some vulgar names we
used to address each other those days.
First, as a student in engineering at T K M College of Engineering Kollam
from 1963 – 68, I was not a bad
student at all. Many of my teachers are
not alive , but still a few of
them may still approve
my statement. I was regular in my
studies and in our year scheme ( not
semester) we had plenty of time
for studies and other extra academic activities good or bad. I could manage to be a good student but still enjoy
many things in my college life. Since our annual examinations were held invariably in April – May, our friends
used to stay, if you want to get a
distinction, start studying from January , to get a first class, start in Feb
and to get a pass, it is good enough if
you start in March. We had
a model examination every year in the
first week of March and two weeks
of study leave afterwards before the examination. Many of my friends who were interested in not missing anything good in college
life, used to study only in these
two last weeks. The hero of the incident I narrated , Mr Hussain
was one among those. As I was reasonably
well prepared for the examinations the first thing I used to do was
to answer the previous year
question papers and secondly, I
used to ‘ teach’ others
living in my lodge or hostel who came to me for help. After a few
days, I used to enjoy this as I
found teaching is the best way to
learn as some of their
natural questions made me think
and give them a good answer while these mock
drills of teaching were taking place.
So, my
first answer to my grandson was : “ I chose
teaching as a career as I wanted
to learn more”. Obviously, this
answer was too
much for him to digest at his tender age and so I had
to give him a more mundane or down to earth answer. Well, that I will discuss in my next episode.
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