LitFest'18 @ MGR University! Revised Dates - 3, 4, 5 October

Teacher's Day Musings from Literature!

At the dawn of yet another delightful Teachers’ Day that acknowledges and celebrates the power and the charm of the teacher, their esteem and their value, and how they shape and mould and impact and influence their students for eternity, here’s a small gleaning from some of literature’s most endearing teachers, both in writers and in their writings.

I believe these personal literary gleanings, would sure motivate all of us to becoming better teachers in the delightful and noble service of dispelling the ‘darkness of ignorance’ from the students entrusted in our noblest care, towards making them better human beings and better citizens of this great nation.

Here’s wishing y’all a Happy teachers’ day and happy inspirational reading too!

Here goes -

1. Teacher Recommends his prodigious Student Achebe!

In 1957, Achebe went to London to attend the British Broadcasting Corporation Staff School. One of his teachers there was the British novelist and literary critic Gilbert Phelps, who recommended Things Fall Apart for publication.

2. To Amis, School life was more rewarding than even family life

To Kingsley Amis, thanks to his teachers, his School was more rewarding than family life. Amis attended Norbury College, where at the age of eleven he had his first story, ‘‘The Sacred Rhino of Uganda,’’ published in the school magazine.

Amis writes enthusiastically about his years at this excellent day school, recalling the broad range of social strata from which its students were drawn and its humane spirit of tolerance: ‘‘I have never in my life known a community where factions of any kind were less in evidence, where differences of class, upbringing, income group and religion counted for so little.’’ Academic standards were high, and Amis, specializing first in classics and then in English, maintained a level that earned him a scholarship to St. John’s College, Oxford.

3. Aristotle, the “most brilliant student” of his master Plato!

Teacher nicknames student as ‘the reader’!

At age seventeen, Aristotle was sent to Athens to attend the most famous school in Greece, the Academy of the great philosopher Plato. At the time, Athens was the intellectual center of the world, and Plato’s Academy was the center of Athens.

Aristotle won recognition as the master’s most brilliant student, and his energetic gathering of research and general love of books led Plato to nickname him ‘‘the reader.’’ During his time at the Academy, Aristotle studied mathematics and dialectic, a form of argumentative reasoning. Aristotle spent twenty years at the Academy, until Plato’s death in 347 B.C.

4. Camus inspired to read widely by his teacher

Albert Camus was greatly inspired to read widely and deeply by his high school teacher, philosopher Jean Grenier, Camus was well versed in the classics of Western philosophy, including the works of Plato, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche—all of whom influenced his work.

5. Chesterton says, ‘I prefer to change society through my teaching’

As a literary journalist, Chesterton was very much in the tradition of the Victorian sage. He was at once a teacher and a literary artist. He sought to change society through his teaching, using symbol, parable, and religious allegory as the most effective way of doing so. Like his close friends George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, he preferred the role of teacher and prophet to that of literary man.

6. Plato’s Treatise in honour of his Teacher

The Republic is a philosophical treatise by Plato. In this text, Plato outlines much of the political theory of his teacher, Socrates.

7. For Dahl, it will be harsh memories of school days!

Roald Dahl recalled in his short autobiographical story ‘‘Lucky Break’’ that the ‘‘beatings at Repton were more fierce and more frequent than anything I had yet experienced.’’ Standing six feet, six inches tall, Dahl played soccer and served as the captain of the squash and handball teams but did not excel in academics. One teacher commented on the fourteen-year-old boy’s English composition work: ‘‘I have never met a boy who so persistently writes the exact opposite of what he means. He seems incapable of marshaling his thoughts on paper.’’