Life lessons from my students
Brendan MacCarthaigh
We are all familiar now with the Me Too movement, and with the names of two great young girls Malala Yusufzai (Nobel Prize-winner) of Pakistan and more recently Greta Thunberg of Sweden. They are only the tip of an iceberg, an iceberg that is crashing through all the safe attitudes and values we have accepted for many centuries. Authority in the form of seniority clung to these mores, and in self-protection (unwittingly disguised as propriety) imposed them on each generation.
But authority’s (seniority’s) Titanic is sinking. Youth is finding its own voice and power. In my own life this has been increasing perceptibly, indeed consistently, though slowly. I have rejoiced in its manifestations, and still do, urging the young to launch out in pursuit of their dreams, thrilled to draw upon their daring to refresh my own grey years. Let me share some of those inspirations with you.
Early in my career as a school-man, I was teaching small boys. Before class began I would be “making an impression” by writing in a notebook while the youngsters were settling noisily into their places. I was aware that I was strutting, and promoting the notion that I was somehow very important or very clever or very something they would be in awe of. One day a small lad piped up quite audibly for the whole class, “You think you’re great”. I’ve forgotten now how I responded, but it taught me not only my stupidity, but also in later years to be gentle with other young teachers who had the same temptation. I learned to be just myself. I offered the insight to colleagues, and in doing so I also learned a lot about inner peace. I hope they did too.
I had a good four-part school choir (s.a.t.b.) in a very musically westernized centre in north India, comprising young teenagers. I was a demanding teacher and conductor, but got on well with the youngsters. One day I invited a boy to try conducting the choir on some simple piece I had taught them. One-two-three, one-two-three – and they started. So far so good. Suddenly he stopped them with a shout, “Stop Stop! You’re like a herd of constipated elephants!” They burst out laughing; of course he was only repeating this and other shouts I had blared during the practices! It was fun indeed, but it did warn me to be more careful of my corrective techniques. This became especially important when I later took on the local university choir and other musical undertakings for more sophisticated musicians.
A teenage boy of my class followed me to my office, saying he wanted to be part of an NGO I was involved in. This NGO focused on the alleviation of pain in the Indian classroom, where ‘pain’ meant boredom, bullying, monotonous pedagogic methods, neglect, abuse, favouritism and so on. It was called SERVE. I had spoken often to the youngsters about departing from the note-and-rote system most schools supported only because it made for higher result percentages. This boy without introduction said, “Sir, I want to join SERVE”.
Now people often join organizations because they like others who are in it, but are not particularly interested in the aim of the organization. So while I was grateful for his offer, I was a little hesitant. I asked him why he wanted to join us.
He plunged into his recent realization that now that he had finished school (his Class XII exams were around the corner) he realized that he was ill-equipped to take his place in the world, and that that world was responsible because of its education structures. He dwelt passionately on this discovery with some bitterness, mentioned Malala and Greta, and hoped SERVE could somehow help him deal with the fear and anger he was now experiencing.
As you would expect, this had a strong effect on me. I had been “singing this song” at countless functions to countless students throughout the many years of my teaching life, apparently to deaf ears, and now suddenly this spark flared. It encouraged me to try even harder to bring relevance back into teaching and syllabi, and life into our dead education structures.
This impatient lad told me of his economics tutor, and that he had talked about me to him. The tutor could not come to my office because he was paralyzed from the ribs down! I went to see him, and found him bedbound, aged about 45, and very much alive. He had become incurably paralyzed below the chest when he was a child in class 2, and that was the end of his schooling. One day when, as he told me, he was just counting the lizards and the flies on his bedroom wall, a child had wandered in to ask him how to spell some word, and he was able to help her.
Out of that, he got inspired to study more on his own, and was now a respected economics teacher not just to my student but to 500 students whom he nursed through their high-school and college exams. He had organized a computer system in his house linking into various rooms (it was a big house) and would communicate with them thus. All for free. As well as that he used a wheel-chair and car to go to various schools exhorting students to make sense of their lives beyond just studying for exams.
I was humbled by his commitment to youth, and to an India he saw in desperate need of such life-giving examples.
Another. It started off as a sort of counselling session, but soon this former student of mine was teaching me about scriptwriting for cinema. With time the contact grew into a friendship, and I learned hard realities from him. Hard realities? Well, I was/am a classroom man. His experiences with difficult domestic friction, to use no stronger term, gave me an insight into the wear-and-tear of daily life for “the other half”. He had to negotiate these tensions while keeping his job, which required the developing and the sustaining of reliable relationships. All this was new to me who had a pretty sheltered and consequently unaware life up to now and I continue to value his influence.
While still new to India I snarled at a senior youngster in my class, who while I was writing on the chalkboard, spat loudly out the back window of the classroom. Actually, let me be honest: I caned him. I still feel the shame of that hasty response, but there it is. That evening, another boy strolled with me to the football field – it was a boarding school – and told me I had been unjust to the lad I had caned. I retorted that I found such behaviour unacceptable, and would continue to discourage it. He explained that it was Ramzan, that the boy was a Muslim, and had no choice but to do what he did. My informant was a Hindu. What an impressive demonstration of friendship! But that wasn’t all.
I met the Muslim lad the next day in school and apologized for my stupidity. “It’s ok sir”, he smiled, dismissing the whole thing, “You’re new to India, how could you know?” and that was that. No need to list the lessons these lads taught me in that experience.
Lastly for the purpose of this evaluation of influences my students have had on me over the years, I remember when I was presenting a play in a Rajasthan high school, ‘Dr Faustus’ by Marlowe. There was a scene where Faustus who had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for the satisfaction of all his desires, discovered that the pretty maidens sent to entertain him were in fact only life-sized dolls. One of the dolls fell on its face in mid-scene. Quick as a flash our 12-year-old ‘stage manager’ darted out, lying as flat to the floor as possible, and levered the thing vertical again so quickly that nobody had time to laugh at the mishap. Through this and other insertions into the act he taught me a lot about stage management, but also about decision-making: decide, do, and move on.
May I enlarge the canvas a little? We discover as we get older that the meaning of our lives is to help all our contacts to arrive at fullness, inner peace, happiness. As teachers we become more aware of that as we get experienced in our profession. So we pay increasing attention to our students. But I think we hardly notice that, however unconsciously, our students have a lot to do with our own striving for fullness, inner peace and happiness. Putting the words of this little essay together has helped me appreciate them more than I previously have. Their responses to us are totally unplanned – and therefore true. It is these that I have relished in writing these paragraphs, and I am hugely grateful to them for what they have done for me throughout my teaching life.
The author has been an educationist in India for more than half a century, and has lectured, made documentaries, and written widely and frequently on the subject. He can be reached at macbren82@gmail.com.
