School Day Reminiscences - III

This blog post is dedicated to Mrs. Kamala Jegadeesan, the Teacher Of All Teachers!

"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires," said William A. Ward. In my opinion, the Teacher Of All Teachers influences posterity into eternity, whose influence doesn't stop merely with the students passing through his/her classroom, and who better than Mrs. Kamala Jegadeesan to epitomize this truth! I can say with all honesty that it was my singular privilege and blessing to be taught by this illustrious lady, that today I am who I am solely because of her, that I have continued and still continue to pass on her inspiration and love for learning to countless numbers of students from all over the world. My memories of SDA School, Madurai, have been truly enriched because of my association with her, and I have never failed to tell a single class of mine these past twenty-five years about her extraordinary influence on me as an impressionable child!

Where do I begin? My love for the English language and its literature came from two people in my life - my father, the lover of books nonpareil who could easily put any academic to shame, and my teacher, Mrs. Jegadeesan, who stoked that inner fire in me, lit by my father at home, into a raging inferno of passion for English at school. I remember one particular English Reader I had in Grade 5, English Today, by Ronald Ridout. The book was handpicked by Mrs. Jegadeesan, and the exercises in it were so interesting and challenging that I still remember them to this day. I was introduced to a whole new world of synonyms and antonyms and proverbs and poems and short stories in this one text that has served me well for a lifetime. Words Are Important was another workbook that helped strengthen my vocabulary, as I grappled at home with those exercises that were too difficult for a child my age. Mrs. Jegadeesan would check them right away each day, despite her great responsibilities as the Headmistress of the school, and it gave me enormous pleasure to see my perfect scores for each exercise and her elaborate comments for the sentences I'd made.

Mrs. Jegadeesan encouraged all of us to memorize poems such as "The Cataract Of Lodore" by Robert Southey, "The Daffodils" by William Wordsworth, "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes, "Ode To A Nightingale" by John Keats, to name a few, poems that I can still recite without a single mistake after all these decades! It was not just the poems alone, but I remember reading and rereading and thoroughly enjoying the short stories from Norah Burke's Jungle Picture, that I knew whole paragraphs from those stories by heart. She brought Shakespeare alive for us in each class, and we would wait with bated breath for the English period just to find out the suspense in Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel, or roll with laughter at the escapades of Pickwick and his friends in Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers or identify ourselves with the mischief of Swami in R.K. Narayan's Swami and Friends.

Who can ever forget how Mrs. Jegadeesan directed us in the annual school plays! I vividly remember playing Portia in Shakespeare's The Merchant Of Venice and the very thought brings alive "The quality of mercy is not strain'd/ It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/ Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:/ It blesseth him that gives and him that takes..." speech from Act IV, Sc.I to mind. I also recall in particular a vocabulary contest she held for students of all grades. She had given us a number of categories like flowers, fruits, feelings, etc., and all we had to do was list as many words as we knew under each category. The contest extended well after school hours, and one by one all the children left for home, until I was the only one remaining, squeezing my brain cells and writing away like a maniac. Mrs. Jegadeesan sat with me patiently, not once urging me to finish, but silently encouraging me to go on and keep doing my best. My mother, who taught at the same school, poked her head into the room once in a while to see if I were done, and finally I had to finish only because it was getting late, and my mother and I had to take the bus to our home in Vilangudi, past Fatima College.

The elocution contests and temperance speeches she organized opened a whole new world of poise and self-confidence in us children. Thanks solely to her, I was fearless facing an audience and still am to this day! She took me and my classmate Harish Bhat to participate in a speech contest in Chennai (Madras, at that time), and I recall quite vividly our train journey with her, the first ever trip for both Harish and myself out of town, without our parents. I still remember that speech of mine on the evils of smoking ... it began, "The easiest way to commit suicide in installments is to start smoking. Smoking is the No. 1 health hazard of modern man! ...." The laurels I won, the accolades I received, the honours that were heaped on me were all because of my noble teacher, and were it not for her, I could not have excelled in whatever I did!

When I was in Grade 9, Mrs. Jegadeesan was transferred out of Madurai, and what a devastating blow that was to all her students! Noone could fill her shoes, and what colossal shoes they were! My connection to her was not confined to the school alone, but extended to the church as well. I knew her on a personal level both inside and outside of school because of those church connections. She was a big admirer of my father's classes at church explaining the prophecies from the Book of Revelation, and many a time would I sit with them, a mere child listening in on their discussions and debates. At school, she was my beloved teacher, an extraordinary educator who singularly influenced me in choosing my career path, and showed me that I could be whoever I wanted to be in life, and be the best in all that I did!

A teacher is a catalyst who brings about positive change in his/her students, and Mrs. Jegadeesan was the most powerful of them all! We passed through her chaste seminary of education, only to emerge as successful human beings and passionate , empathetic ciitizens of the world. To you, my teacher, the Teacher Of All Teachers, I owe everything in life, and pay my heartfelt obeisance for all that you have been and done for me!!!