Teacher teacher…

My driver Sharief gave me a flower this morning. Why, I demanded. He explained to me that it was Teacher’s Day and, since I was determined that he learning English, he was wishing me happy. But I didn’t do anything, I protested, the flower should belong to his children, who were doing – or trying to – the teaching. No, he insisted, it was mine, since I had shown him how to start learning the language in a very simple and easy manner, without the stress of knowing alphabets, spelling and grammar. That, he said, was the way it was taught in school, and that was the way he had believed he would have to do it, an impossibility at his age, he stated.

In my version, all he had to do was to start becoming conscious of familiarity – of how the words he already knew were written, so that he could recognise them. Look at film posters, I suggested, at signboards, at car names, at food packets. He would know what was written on them, since he knew what the contents were, enough English and the alphabet and, from there on, he just had to do a little jump of consciousness to awareness of words and how they were made. To be thanked so profusely for something so simple was flattering, embarrassing, even idiotic, especially since I was talking off the top of my frizzy head, applying only a little of my own training as a teacher of English to those for whom English was not a native language.

In college I had to teach, and found it quite an interesting experience, a ‘learning experience’, in fact. On my first stint as a very new graduate student who had never done anything for herself, I had to tutor a group of people who were not only much larger than I was, but who also topped me in age by at least ten years on average. It was frightening when I walked into the classroom on the first day. Gradually, using my instinctive strategy of being my usual mad self and perfectly normal, natural and neurotic, I fast-talked my way through the course, making friends with my students and finding them becoming comfortable with me to the extent that most of them called me ‘honey’ and offered to help me with my homework. One elderly gentleman suggested he could be my babysitter; a football jock made overtures to be my bodyguard. Both were almost instantly rebuffed, with a smile, but stayed in touch long after I had left the state.

I myself have had a host of fabulous teachers, some better than others, and with a few rats thrown in to balance the mix. Perhaps my least favourite in school was the man who taught me Physics. It was a subject that I never could understand, leave alone master, even though my own father was a physicist. The teacher was long and large and lecherous, getting just that little bit too close and too intimate for comfort, but not enough for him to be thrown out of his position. He managed to teach me – and many others – very little Physics, but gave us a hatred of the subject that endures even today.

In contrast was my high school English teacher, a certain Mr Short, who was anything but. He was long and lean and lanky, all arms and legs, with a mop of curly hair, a neat beard and a smile that had us girls in blushing emotional chaos. He taught me to appreciate if not completely understand international literature of the ilk of Ibsen, Achebe and Beckett, left me wondering just what Godot waited for, why Pope was so funny and who the real villain was in Julius Caesar. With the supreme confidence of adolescence, I wrote a poem instead of a regular essay for one particular assignment and was gently and easily squashed by his response, also in perfectly rhyming verse that left me gasping, totally outclassed. Mr Short encouraged us all to be creative, predicting even that early that I would never be able to fit into a conventional mould. Perhaps he was right.

My fiction teacher in college pushed me further along the track of ‘difference’. She sat through readings of my decidedly eccentric writings, from a soap opera scenario-plus-real life story in disjointed prose to an old-style adventure, much of it set in pitch dark on Long Island. She indulged my madness, reading through reams of something I fondly imagined to be a murder mystery, carefully edited down a sci-fi/horror short that was actually printed some years later in a well-known magazine and talked me out of getting down and dirty with an ‘erotic thriller’ that was completely beyond my ken, with my rather limited knowledge of both parts that described the genre. She encouraged me even after I left her aegis, reading my work as it was published in various newspaper and magazines and applauding every new experiment with balanced critique attached. Soon she was a friend, Carolyn rather than Ms McGrath.

I had many teachers through school and college and university, many of whom were people whom I have fond memories of. There were some toads, whom I refused to kiss up to when they demanded it, but for the most part, they turned into princes (and princesses) without too much asking. Maybe if I had not had a pea in my mattress, I would have been a better student!