When
you have been teaching for as long as I have, nothing warms the cockles of your
heart as much old boys and girls thanking you and recounting things that they
have held dear for decades.
So
I am absolutely thrilled and delighted to report two wonderful things that have
happened over the last three days:
Saikat
Chakraborty, who has been working on a way to mimic photosynthesis (or, more accurately, photocatalysis) to use
widely available and economically viable materials to produce hydrogen from
water – to be used as a clean and endlessly available fuel for the future – has
just submitted his PhD thesis for evaluation halfway around the world and
dedicated it to me. I’m not sure, but even the quote from Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, ‘Water will be
the coal of the future’, might owe a bit to something I might have said in
class long, long ago.
And
two nights ago, the mother of one of my current pupils told me why she has sent
her daughter to my tuition: for something far beyond getting a good score in
board exams – 'Sir, I remember how you scribbled ‘tin, tap, toy, toll, tax’ on
the board and made us repeat the right pronunciation, not the hard t-s of
Indian languages but the correct soft t of English'. I myself had learnt that in
class 7 from my then English teacher Diana Mukherjee – an Englishwoman who had
married a Bengali – and have been passing it on to my pupils decade after
decade, but this lady remembered it, right to the extent of the correct
sequence of the five words I had listed, almost twenty five years ago! To say that I felt bliss would be a
poor approximation of what I did feel.
The
truth is, literally thousands of pupils have reason to be grateful, only not
the capacity, the depth of mind to understand the value of what they were
taught, nor the degree of civilization necessary to acknowledge the debt. Look up
my old blogpost Ingratitude and karma.
So Saikat and Tandrani, thank you from the bottom of an old teacher’s heart.
Any spiteful, stupid and ignorant cretin can call you names: you have to be
human to feel grateful.
8 comments:
Dear Sir,
Thank you for what you have done and continue to do for me. Some of the most cherished memories of my life will be your classes. And be it Jules Verne or Arthur C. Clarke or Bertrand Russell, the list is endless...all I can say is that I am grateful to have known someone like you.
With love,
Saikat.
Dear Suvroda
You make a difference to many lives, including mine.
Regards
Tanmoy
Dear sir,
You have had unknowingly carved out a rivulet of wonders in this once-unwieldy mass of myself, over the years.
I apologise for taking up this public forum as a pulpit to tell you this....I feel privileged to have been in your company for more than a decade, be it revelling in the dimensions of extraordinary books and films from your treasure trove, or in your rational counsel when I was down in the dumps, over the course of numerous delightful evenings spent at your home.
So, let me muster the courage to admit that I haven't been in touch with you, which admittedly shows a lackadaisical nature on my part.
I wish you the best of health and may ever more young minds bask in your radiance.
Regards,
Sayan Roy (Kolkata).
Dear Sir,
A part of me is always a bit sad that I never studied directly under your tutelage, stubborn as I was at the time that I would learn everything in my own way, I have still so much to thank you for. All that I am now, I owe a large part of it to my teachers and in particular you. I pray to God that (s) he gives you all kinds of happiness in this mortal world and that in the next life if such things exist, we meet again as a teacher, student and good friends.
For all the things you have taught me, some knowingly, others unknowingly, I am forever grateful.
Warm regards,
Subhasis Chakraborty
Dear Sir, the Indianisms, the right pronunciation for education and the very funny pronunciation that our teachers and so called many educated person used to say "Cousin brother" still makes me giggle right now.I came to learn English from you but at the end of 2015 i learned a lot more than just mugging up some textbooks unlike my other friends did. The importance of reading books other than academic one was taught by you and not only career options are limited to doctors and engineers.I still recall some stereotypical aunties used to ask me whether sir gives us notes or not cause they used to believe one who provides tons of notes is an excellent teacher.
For all this sir i,m forever in debt to you sir.
May you are in a good health
Regards
Siddhartha Pal
Dear Sir,
Ever since I had joined your classes, I have cherished them and although I was not there when you taught us the pronunciation of the letter "T", I do remember that you recalled this incident in the class and told us how to pronounce "th" in "thanks" (the=sz) and "that" (th=vz). I try to practice "th" that way, and I found it easier to say "sz" than "vz" but I will keep on trying.
Yours obediently,
Upama Dutta
That should be 'sf' and 'zv' actually, Upama :(
Sir
Well, we are all grateful to you, Sir, for your lessons.
However, I do wish you had taught us more about pronunciation and phonetics, accents, and intonations, as well. In my case, I wasn't lucky enough to have an English lady as a teacher like you, but my grandfather, who had lived in the UK for a very long time, taught me the basics of British English. And, we listened to the BBC every evening around 20:00 on short wave 31 on our gigantic vintage radio. In that way, I was very fortunate, indeed.
I also realized that when it comes to learning languages, one needs to have the burning drive to excel and the ability to teach oneself rather than rely completely on teachers, otherwise even having great teachers is of no use.
The experience of learning English has helped me in learning Japanese later on. Ironically, it is the language I started learning last at the age of 19 that I am best at. My English vocabulary may be superior to my Japanese vocabulary, but I have learned to speak not only the standard variety of the Japanese language but several other dialects as well. Among all the five languages that I know well, I cannot emulate the same versatility as Japanese in any other language. I have come to believe that that kind of versatility is only possible by living in the country where that language is spoken/used for a very long time. As, perhaps you will agree, xams don't really reveal everything. I had already passed the highest level of the Japanese exam before I ever came to Japan. And, again, I have come across people who have been living here for over forty years and yet they haven't crossed the threshold of the very basics.
Regards,
Rajdeep
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