Happy diwali to all of you. Here is small memoir about my school Saraswathi Vidyalaya in Nagpur and its principal R D Swami. Enjoy My family joins me in wishing you all a cracking 2013 diwali Here it is: Mistakes makes you perfect! Her name was Mrs Swami. She was always referred as Swami Teacher, the principal of Saraswathi Vidyalaya at Nagpur in Maharashtra. She was the strictest teacher of my 20 years of education. She used to carry the scale but never used. Her 5.10 inch height, well built body and her dark colour was enough to terrorize the “bad boys” of those years. She can make tough boys shiver by rolling her eyes. Parents love to have their children in that school only because of her. When I started going to school at the age of six, I was forewarned about this tough lady and told that she is a zero tolerance teacher. First day in the school she addressed us and told us that she does not teach to first standard students but will come and do surprise checks of notebooks and home work. Nobody’s notebook in that school ever escaped her red pen mark. Year passed and the next year we started learning words, she entered the class and started telling us how we make small sentences. Later on my father told me that those sentences had dozen mistakes in spellings. But the markings on the side by Swami Teacher were always “good” to “very good”. Sometimes I got even “wounderful”. I used to come back home and show it to my mother, who did not understand English and showed it to my father after he returns home with joy and he used to get mad on her. He used to say every sentence and every word that I wrote on the note book were wrong. And my mother used to defend me saying that “if swami teacher has said good means it is good. In fact you know nothing about English”. My father, who had a command on English language always felt insulted after that argument but did not dare question Swami Teacher. Wrong spellings and wrong grammar were regular on my notebook and one day my father could not tolerate and took the notebook from me and walked into her cabin. I was not there to listen to their conversation. But after that he never said a word about my writing. Years passed by, I also forgot the issue. Finished my education, became a journalists and one day in Mumbai we received the news of her death. The curiosity in me suddenly forced me to ask my father what was the conversation between her and him then. He said in verbatim: Natti, (my father name is natarajan and was referred by close people as Natti) Don’t you think I know English better than you? I know they are wrong. All of them in the class are wrong when it comes to any language, not only English. But the children are just beginning to get excited about writing words, forming sentences and all of them are not with just mistakes but with blunders. If I put my red pen on their copy, I would be dampening the spirit of writing. I will be killing the bud before it bloom and start loving words. Let them fall in love with words. Spellings and grammars can wait. I don’t want them to hate words that have red ink marks. Funda is that when you introduce something new any human being of any age, never go with the ‘do and don’t list’. That will dampen the spirit of loving that product or learning. Encourage them to embrace the new thing and then correct it en route.
Posted on: Fri, 01 Nov 2013 08:06:43 +0000
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