Guru

I just finished my summer finals and am resting in my bedroom listening to some soft rock. Looking back at the exam I just gave, I really didn't care much about how much I would score in it. Because the course itself wasn't much of value addition, contrary to what had thought earlier. Though the course was 'advanced algorithms' and the syllabus was quite 'advanced', professor ruined it completely. He would never tell us why he is doing what he is doing, always relying on meaningless theoretical deductions. For a course related to algorithms, this question becomes extremely important. He killed our interest in the subject. Anyways this actually prompts me to write about the best teacher I have encountered in my student life, till now.

I have to go back back to the days of my 7th grade. We have something called state level 'scholarship' exam in 7th grade. Its an optional exam that assesses your mathematical, language & reasoning skills. I always knew that I would be appearing for it, because I had performed very well in previous such exam in 4th grade(34th among 100,000 students). And so I joined Bhagwat Madam's tuition.

The tuition started in the beginning of school year, every morning 8 to 10:30 followed by 11 to 5 school. For initial 2-3 months, I didn't have much interest, or I wasn't enjoying the tuition very much. First because, I had to get up quite early (7 AM), when my other classmates were still in bed. Secondly, there used to be daily homework and regular tasks like memorizing tables, cubes, squares (for math skills), reading proverbs, idioms (for linguistic skills). And even though there were lot of new things to learn and I was (and still am) good at grasping them, it wasn't clicking.

But afterwords I somehow started enjoying it. May be because I realized, I can do it and can do it really well. There were challenging questions almost everyday, and it was real fun learning something new and understanding learned things in a new way. I happened to be really good at languages, despite my pathetic hand-writing. I would really enjoy writing essays, letters and to include relevant (sometimes irrelevant ;) ) idioms & proverbs, in them.

By the end of that year, a news came that our the scholarship exam, which was suppose to happen in coming February, was postponed to April, just before 7th grade finals. It was both good & bad news. That meant I had very less time to prepare for finals, but I could spend and enjoy more time at class. By the end of March, madam's confidence in me was so increased that she declared that if I top in languages paper, she would give me some cash reward. My handwriting was my weak point. No matter how much I tried to improve it wasn't as good as that of toppers. For all other papers, hand-writing wasn't an issue because it was an MCQ exam.

I distinctly remember the exam day. I had done my best & I just had to go there and deliver it. First was languages paper. I wrote essays first and started solving MCQs. After sometime, I realized that exam supervisor was standing behind me and is reading my essay. I was startled, but that lady was all praise for my essay. Such a thing is kind of a morale booster in those tense moments.

Math, and reasoning papers were also good. Math was bit different that time, which surprised many, but not me. I was pretty much prepared for anything. The exam was over, and I started preparing for my finals.

Results came somewhere in June or July. I knew that I hadn't done bad. But just to be prepared for worst results, I didn't hope much. As it turned out, I was fourth in my school and 16th in entire Mumbai city, among 100,000 students appeared that year. And no, I didn't top languages paper, but as a consolation I had topped Math, at least in my school. Needless to say, we were overjoyed and our madam was very happy to see her efforts bearing fruits.

Now, you would think, whats the point in remembering so small and old moments. But these moments are precious for me. They have helped me coping up when I was down and out. They told me that I had done it once, I can do it again.

The role of Bhagwat madam here was to bring the best out of me and to help me find out what I really liked. Such should be every teacher. A teacher you think of when Guru-Pournima comes.