People (3)...

Before we were introduced to the finer pleasures of life… the word ‘Teachers’ inspired only one sentiment in those who heard it… loathing. The group of people entrusted with the job of getting us to absorb values and knowledge could safely be written out of the list of people we wanted to be around. And now… even after ‘Teachers’ helps us get high in style… any mention of that revolting bunch takes the fun out of the most enjoyable of moments.

Granted that there are exceptions… but if the general mass of these lowlifes are considered… then they would only narrowly escape being the top choice for public stoning at the hands of the far more numerous students. The top spot would be held by ‘Exam Invigilators’.

Over the course of a long and meandering student life along the endless plains of unheeded knowledge, I have had the misfortune to come across more teachers than should have been my due. A full eleven times more than guys who only ever went to one school. And as such, I consider myself eligible to write this dissertation regarding the worst of my foes… the buggers who tried to educate me.

My experiences of the first few formative years at the mercy of the soulless messengers of Satan… are blurred by a veil of tears. I remember feeling helpless, lost and overwhelmed. Oh and being locked in a bathroom as punishment when I was three years old.

Even I wouldn’t do that to a kid! No… not even to the annoying brat that lives upstairs. But… good going teacher, you certainly didn’t let age stand in the way of your sadistic pleasures.

The next few years passed uneventfully… I changed schools a few times and didn’t find much worth remembering. The teachers during this phase treated the students, who provided their livelihoods by dint of existence, with regal disdain. We were beneath their contempt… and they were beyond our concerns. All in all… it was a rather peaceful way to coexist indeed.

The real fun… or trouble… depending on your perspective, started when I was in class five.

Finally arriving at the threshold of being allowed to wear trousers, we had started observing the world around us. We spotted how teachers cooed over students who went to them for private tuitions… and noted how they kicked the likes of me out at the slightest provocation… and sometime even without that. We first witnessed how teachers went back on their words when it came to things like promised field trips and emphasis on physical retribution. We watched silently as teachers taught one thing in class one day… and vehemently protested against it the next morning. They insisted that the whole class was mistaken when they claimed he had said that Gandhi had killed Godsey.

But after a few years of enjoying the sight of teachers dodging the queries they had professed to welcome… times changed again. Now in grades high enough to require at least some knowledge on the part of the faculty in charge… we were greeted with a new scene. The stuttering of an incompetent fool when he messed up the lines he had memorized before class.

Teachers refused to solve our doubts on spot… instead insisting that they would bring back the solutions the next day. They made us mug up the thousand page books of chemistry and couldn’t explain a single sentence of it in their own words. And in spite of the already deplorable situation… the worst was yet to come.

In the last couple of years of my schooling, I perceived and fell prey to a character flaw that proved that teachers were human beings too… and not very good ones either. Favoritism was mirrored and distorted in the form of personal grudges that manifested themselves in low marks in exams and frequent tongue lashings in class. The best programmer in a class was given average marks for an exam where he was the first to obtain the output… while several others got well above ninety for being blank about the subject.

And so my schooling ended… but my run-ins with teachers, sadly, did not.

Now masquerading under the new tag of ‘Professor’, I was greeted by them at the gates of my college. Fate it seems had yet to show me all the avatars of my old nemesis.

I saw faculty members who took five twenty minute classes per semester in exchange for a fifty grand salary… demand pay hikes and shut down the college. I saw teachers who were a loss to the political scenario talk up a storm in close door meetings as they negotiated tactics on how to pressurize the management. I saw teachers rage at students for missing classes where no faculty had been present.

It’s not as if I needed another excuse to say no to higher studies… but the thought of having to put up with more teachers… really puts the lid on it.

A teacher… as far as the majority of them is concerned… is a balanced mixture of incompetence, arrogance, favoritism and vindictiveness, determined to use his position for maximum leverage over the students who he is supposed to educate.

It’s only due to the presence of a small handful that education is still imparted… and most of us have at least one nice memory to preserve from the years spent with teachers.