Teacherisms

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When we were in our school in the good old 1950s, we were taught a few examples of English proverbs. The only one I recall is:

"Manners make a man"

By virtue of the sorry decision a teacher takes to make his living in the class room, he and his manners and mannerisms are under constant and critical scrutiny by his students. There is no escape from mannerisms...all of us have them willy-nilly. There is this story about Daddy Mitra. He was so cut up with the misbehavior of his students that he is once reported to have tried to scold them saying:

"If you can't behave well,...don't behave!"

Since it is impossible not to behave, stories of teachers' behavior abound. The other day, I received a copy of the Diamond Jubilee (Physics) Souvenir and happened to read a droll piece by Siddharth Dwivedi (Integrated M Sc 2008). Since it has been in the public domain for quite a while I guess it is ok for me to stoop to quoting from his article:

"...A short figure, frequently adjusting his specs, he would continue with his love for the chalk and the blackboard in a rather slow and self amused manner...with his speech going into occasional 'ummmmm...ummmmm', and this would take a big slice of his lecture until a coffee break was announced...but all the same we loved his style and he to me is one of the best as seen yet...

...A person with an absolute 'no nonsense or you are dead' look on his face he would straightaway start...But outside the class if one had the courage to talk, he was a totally different person. Always ready to help...

...His trade mark countenance was a smile over any poor soul's over-enthusiasm for a self-acclaimed understanding of the subject, which he took no more than 3 minutes to thwart away...

...Writing the proof on the blackboard, suddenly he would bring us out of our reverie to ask: 'Have I made any mistake?'...."

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All in all I guess Physics Teachers at KGP nowadays are a very interesting lot. I feel like becoming a student once again and enjoy sitting in their classes.

Here are some of my fond recollections of the mannerisms of my Teachers:

There was this Math Teacher in our moffusill college. His handwriting was superb. But the moment he turned towards us, he would jerk his left shoulder up and elaborately down, again and again and again...so we never could concentrate on what he was saying. And if we stared at him, he would stop jerking and start asking questions...and bang us and get irritated and start jerking all over again.

And our Phy Dept at AU those days never boasted of Theoreticians...unlike KGP ;-) But they had to teach us QM and so did job-rotation...3 teachers used to share. Two of them were seriously trying to hide their ignorance (impossible) behind a stern countenance and got ignored by us. But there was this third one, a senior professor of spectroscopy, who would start his lecture with a broad grin that said it all. He would turn to the blackboard and copy a few equations and turn back and grin. And we would all grin. And he would turn back to the blackboard and copy a few more equations and turn back and grin...I always wished I could grin like him, but I never could...I was a hypocrite. I saw that beseeching grin later on occasionally in one or two students at KGP when they were facing their Grand Viva...

Like Feynman, we too had to attend Lectures on Philosophy and write an exam on the subject along with Biology, Economics and Astronomy. This gentleman, who later became VC of a neighboring University, would talk to himself most of the time. Our class was 120 strong and even frontbenchers couldn't make out any word except when he got excited and said Hegel and Kant. Backbenchers like us used to play what we called 'game of dots'. But one day our frontbenchers told us that they decided to listen keenly and succeeded in counting how many times he said: "I mean". The score was 120 in one hour.

The most obnoxious mannerism of one of our teachers was that he would utter: "Do you understand?" 120 times in an hour...

"I mean" was far more civilized...

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