My mother, the teacher
My mother has always been a teacher - intermittently in professional positions but relentlessly in her everyday life. She's the kind of adult that terrifies visiting children with her trick questions and runs after any young person within her purview (fruitlessly in my daughter's case) with a handwriting exercise book to get them to improve their cursive writing. As soon as a school child enters her orbit, she fixes her with a gimlet eye and asks which class she's in. "Class six? hmm. You know veins carry blue blood and arteries carry red blood. Can you tell me which vein carries red blood?" Another of her favorite questions is "What is x to the power zero?" She has a whole collection of these. Any child that is spirited enough to withstand this interrogation wins her approval forever, and, to use a bangla colloquialism, is "forgiven seven murders" (ওর সাত খুন মাপ). When I was a kid, she would cast a benign eye on my unruly, incorrigible cousins (who made my life miserable by teasing) and, just because they were top students in school, say "Oh, they don't mean any harm. They really do love you, you know." (She wasn't totally wrong. They are upstanding citizens these days and generally kindly disposed towards me.)
Whenever our extended family got together, my mom was thrilled to have so many children within her reach night and day. She would pursue my cousins, armed with math problems which, to give her credit, she tried to make more palatable by personalizing. To my cousin Tapan she said one day, "Tapan gives 20 marbles to DonDon..etc." Tapan, who didn't get along very well with his cousin DonDon retorted, "I don't want to give DonDon any marbles, not even in a math problem." "Fine, I'll change it - DonDon gives Tapan 20 marbles." At that, Tapan looked seriously into my mother's eyes and said, "Listen maima, I want to make this clear. I don't want any dealings with DonDon. I don't want to give anything or take anything."
Paradoxically, this person who so deeply values cleverness and school success, has always been immensely patient with struggling learners. To experience that side of her, of course, you would have to be someone outside her immediate family (i.e. not me or her younger siblings). For many years she tutored kids at home and her whole attitude towards every one of them - the busy bee working industriously, the dreamer staring out of the window, the slacker trying to get away with minimum work - was so gentle and tolerant, it made me want to cry sometimes at the unfairness of it. Once, one of my mother's students and I were standing outside the house with her when a new neighbour came by. "Are these your daughters?" he asked. My mother smiled nicely and said "yes". A stickler for accuracy in those days, I asked her why she had given the man wrong information. "So what should I have said," retorted my mom, "that she's NOT my child?"
Perhaps this instinctively felt parental impulse to nurture and tend is what defines my mother the teacher more than the somewhat mean portrait I drew earlier of an interrogator with child-confounding weapons. This is probably the secret of her decades-long bond with her first ever tutoring student. She only taught him for a short time when he was 10 years old. Then she got married and went away. Many years later, when the boy was in college, she got an urgent summons one day from his dad. When she went over, the father said sternly "Do you have any idea what your student has been up to?" "My student!" My mom was astounded. She had tutored him for less than a year when he was in elementary school. "He has been bunking classes. He is getting failing marks. No one knows how he spends his time. You need to talk to him." I don't know what was said in the talk that followed or even whether that particular talk had any role to play in his transformation. But that boy graduted from college, became a succesful businessman and, more importantly, a person who does all he can to help those around him. He has stayed in touch with my mother all through the years and invites her to every important event in his life. Every year, without fail, a cake from him arrives on my mother's birthday. If he's in town, he brings it himself and spends a pleasant hour or two chatting with her.
My parents have both been lucky in a similar way. My father, a doctor, wanted to work until the end. He got his wish. He kept working past eighty, even when he could no longer walk from the car to the elevator (they ferried him back and forth in a wheelchair). On his last day of work, he was so sick that they admitted him into the hospital. He stayed there for a month (some of the time unconscious, breathing with the help of a machine) before all hope of recovery passed and the ventilator was unhooked. My 90+ mother has volunteered for the past few decades at Khelaghar, a residential school for kids whose parents can't afford to educate them. Most of the time when I call these days, she doesn't have much to say. But on the days she goes to Khelaghar, her voice is buoyant and she's full of news. "Today I gave the teachers an English grammar lesson, active voice and passive voice" she says, or "You know they send the most difficult kids to me...this boy refused to do any work in class but today with me he wrote a whole paragraph all by himself!" The pandemic almost put a stop to these outings but school has started up again and recently she attended one of their yearly festivals with songs, dances and a feast. At an age when most people are felled not only by disease but also the feeling of purposelessness, my mother, the eternal teacher, is lucky to have a school that she loves going to, a place where kids welcome her with eager voices and bright eyes full of possibility, a place that makes her come alive like nothing else.
Whenever our extended family got together, my mom was thrilled to have so many children within her reach night and day. She would pursue my cousins, armed with math problems which, to give her credit, she tried to make more palatable by personalizing. To my cousin Tapan she said one day, "Tapan gives 20 marbles to DonDon..etc." Tapan, who didn't get along very well with his cousin DonDon retorted, "I don't want to give DonDon any marbles, not even in a math problem." "Fine, I'll change it - DonDon gives Tapan 20 marbles." At that, Tapan looked seriously into my mother's eyes and said, "Listen maima, I want to make this clear. I don't want any dealings with DonDon. I don't want to give anything or take anything."
Paradoxically, this person who so deeply values cleverness and school success, has always been immensely patient with struggling learners. To experience that side of her, of course, you would have to be someone outside her immediate family (i.e. not me or her younger siblings). For many years she tutored kids at home and her whole attitude towards every one of them - the busy bee working industriously, the dreamer staring out of the window, the slacker trying to get away with minimum work - was so gentle and tolerant, it made me want to cry sometimes at the unfairness of it. Once, one of my mother's students and I were standing outside the house with her when a new neighbour came by. "Are these your daughters?" he asked. My mother smiled nicely and said "yes". A stickler for accuracy in those days, I asked her why she had given the man wrong information. "So what should I have said," retorted my mom, "that she's NOT my child?"
Perhaps this instinctively felt parental impulse to nurture and tend is what defines my mother the teacher more than the somewhat mean portrait I drew earlier of an interrogator with child-confounding weapons. This is probably the secret of her decades-long bond with her first ever tutoring student. She only taught him for a short time when he was 10 years old. Then she got married and went away. Many years later, when the boy was in college, she got an urgent summons one day from his dad. When she went over, the father said sternly "Do you have any idea what your student has been up to?" "My student!" My mom was astounded. She had tutored him for less than a year when he was in elementary school. "He has been bunking classes. He is getting failing marks. No one knows how he spends his time. You need to talk to him." I don't know what was said in the talk that followed or even whether that particular talk had any role to play in his transformation. But that boy graduted from college, became a succesful businessman and, more importantly, a person who does all he can to help those around him. He has stayed in touch with my mother all through the years and invites her to every important event in his life. Every year, without fail, a cake from him arrives on my mother's birthday. If he's in town, he brings it himself and spends a pleasant hour or two chatting with her.
My parents have both been lucky in a similar way. My father, a doctor, wanted to work until the end. He got his wish. He kept working past eighty, even when he could no longer walk from the car to the elevator (they ferried him back and forth in a wheelchair). On his last day of work, he was so sick that they admitted him into the hospital. He stayed there for a month (some of the time unconscious, breathing with the help of a machine) before all hope of recovery passed and the ventilator was unhooked. My 90+ mother has volunteered for the past few decades at Khelaghar, a residential school for kids whose parents can't afford to educate them. Most of the time when I call these days, she doesn't have much to say. But on the days she goes to Khelaghar, her voice is buoyant and she's full of news. "Today I gave the teachers an English grammar lesson, active voice and passive voice" she says, or "You know they send the most difficult kids to me...this boy refused to do any work in class but today with me he wrote a whole paragraph all by himself!" The pandemic almost put a stop to these outings but school has started up again and recently she attended one of their yearly festivals with songs, dances and a feast. At an age when most people are felled not only by disease but also the feeling of purposelessness, my mother, the eternal teacher, is lucky to have a school that she loves going to, a place where kids welcome her with eager voices and bright eyes full of possibility, a place that makes her come alive like nothing else.
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