Day One of your College job. Your first, the very first lecture as a “teacher” for B.A, final year, English literature (Elective). Twenty odd students, mostly girls peer down dubiously as you shuffle to the front of their class. You introduce yourself and it sounds fraudulent. The students are in the process of measuring you up from all angles from your top to toe and you feel elephant sized butterflies in your stomach…. This being the elective subject, there are just three texts prescribed- a poem, Homer’s Odyssey, a play “Death of a salesman” by American playwright Arthur Miller and a novel, The Coolie by Mulk Raj Anand . The intention is that the students should study these in great depth. You have joined mid session and the teacher who was engaging this class earlier has told you with boastful pride that he has already discussed the Coolie and The Death of the Salesman with the class and has introduced the Odyssey. So, to give the impression that you mean business, you come straight to the point. You ask the students what they know about Greece and Greek mythology. The blank faces tell you your question is Greek to them and that they are at sea even more than Odysseus was. First googly. Unfazed, you ask them what they have learnt about the poem. There is pin drop silence in the class. You try to impress the students by reciting a few famous lines from memory and the damn memory fails you when you need it the most. You get stuck. You speak faster to drown your folly, miss out on some more lines but know the students would neither know nor care. Bad idea none the less. You notice that most students have come without the text book. You ask them the reason and they enlighten you that they do not have the text books, have not brought the book so far. Aghast, you tell them to get the text books that day itself thus gaining the blessings of the lone bookseller in the city. Suddenly you see the blackboard. It is large, clean and inviting and immediately comes to your rescue. You start writing feverishly and it quickly fills up with details on Greek literature . You instruct the students to note down the details you have provided and they do. But what next? Only fifteen minutes have elapsed and the period is of forty five minutes. You donot believe that is happening to someone whose parents have been illustrious teachers and who thought that teaching was in her blood. Because of this exaggerated faith in your abilities, you donot take the students’s roll call at the beginning of the class(thereby “saving” five minutes) believing that those who come to the class just to get themselves marked present need not come at all. You say this thing aloud, trying to be humorous but nobody laughs. Bad idea again. You’ve failed to connect. Even the blackboard offers no help. How will you do this for a whole semester, much less a lifetime? You put all your angst into yanking at the stub of chalk. Trying to think of some thing, the horror of horrors happens. Suddenly your foot gets stuck in the chair meant for the teacher and you lose your balance literally and are barely able to avoid a fall. The class giggles at your fall from grace. You turn around to see their smirks and smile yourself and lo! Being fallible, you are accepted and your teaching career is launched. After a few iterations of the same class, you’ve got your material down. Your timing improves. Poetry is difficult, Odyssey specially so. Greek mythology, like the Hindu one has so many plots and subplots, it needs a wizard to understand even the major players but you have a talent for making it accessible and to unravel the mysteries. Once in a while, lively discussion happens in the class. You feel good seeing the light go on in students’ eyes. You’re proud of your rapport with students; you know most of them by name, you get to know the ones who come late habitually, the ones who are shy of speaking in English, and the ones who come to the class to stare at you and your rather misplaced enthusiasm in the nuances of poetry, and those as well who, experiencing heart breaks with their own “affairs” feel what a confused man Odysseus was( one student unable to say Odysseus blurted out Odious to everyone’s amusement.) and even more so, the boring Mr Homer, the sadist, who wrote such long winding poems. ! (Sometimes, to embarrass them, you wave at them when they’re in the cafeteria, snacking with friends.) When one colleague reveals he’s so fed up with teaching that he’s retiring early, it’s hard to imagine ever feeling the same. You start measuring time in semesters, not years. The happiness is short lived though. The test that you take after one month is a disaster and those who have managed to write something have all mugged up their answers from cheap reference books. So you hand out an anonymous survey. You’re shocked by the seething frustration expressed. The class has been sitting in the dark, unable to keep up. It turns out that since the last time you taught this course, there has been a sharp decline in high-school poetry skills. So you throw yourself into remedial work, organizing extra sessions. Only one student, one least in need of help shows up. You start thinking hard, you try to discard all your old ways, and start staying up nights to think up interesting things that will not only amuse but also enlighten (e.g. the crux of Odyssey- Do not be afraid of death , be afraid of the unlived life! but alas, your students are more willing to listen to the profound thoughts on love and life expressed in the songs of Surjit Bindrakhiya rather than realize the mundane truth of these bland statements). You experience a revelation: You task is to illuminate literature’s beauty to the students. When they remain unconverted, you decide the classroom is to blame. You change your tactics and your setting. Way to go! You set out to organize an exhibition in the college corridor, (with the students’ help, of course) one that will convey in layman’s terms the essence of poetry in particular and literature in general. You can already see the banner on campus: Understand Poetry in Forty-five Minutes or Your Money Back! You even manage to get the teachers of Hindi and Punjabi excited about your idea. Yess! Except that after two days you know that won’t be enough and it is not. Not many students show up. Not many teachers show up as well. What the heck. Your enthusiasm has dampened a bit, but just a bit. You want the students to enact the poem in the form of a drama at the college’s Annual day. That way, the non literature students will also get a chance to dip in the fabled world of poetry- the pillar of civilization. The students are mildly interested but tell you frankly their mouths will start hurting by speaking so much English and that the audience will be bored stiff for obvious reasons and they ask you if the play could be done in Punjabi. Holy cow. You float the idea of holding a quiz on literature and the stares that you get are enough to tell you there are no takers. A quiz on Hindi movies has much more acceptability. Fiddle dee dee. You begin to realise the truth in the statement that you can take the horse to water but cannot make it drink, as these horses are more interested in drinking the stagnant waters in the form of guide books with tailor made and almost silly answers rather than taste the heavenly flavoured water from the springs of the original poems from text books. But you do not give up…How about a poster competition where the students could use their imagination to draw characters with their contemporary costumes from the poems ? “The adolescent boys of the college would have a field day “drawing” Helen and she would be tossing and turning in her grave like never before”, the Principal, himself a teacher of Punjabi, tells you. The fire within is still not extinguished. You trawl the web for more resources. A colleague helps you set up a discussion board but the students soon get bored with board, almost pig like stubborn not to learn any thing new….. Before you know it, you’re one semester old. Somehow, in the process, you yourself learn the true meaning of Odyssey. How could the Greeks, who knew that no one enters the same river twice believe in homecoming and resting? You realize that your own Odyssey is rugged and will wear you out unless you show Odysseus like resolve. Thus, you yourself become the Odysseus, feeling the great Greek in your every bone and sinew. Odysseus did not return home to stay, but to set off again. It is the story of your and everyman’s coming of age and you come to know that it is the story of life: both fruitful and futile, of motion: both purposeful and purposeless… ….
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 11:21:24 +0000
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