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.’’

One year later, another comment on an English composition of Dahl’s read: ‘‘A persistent muddler. Vocabulary negligible, sentences mal-constructed. He reminds me of a camel.’’ Dahl would later describe his school years as ‘‘days of horrors’’ that inspired much of his macabre fiction.

8. Teacher seeks to evolve from his monotonous existence

The English Teacher (1945), is a novel by R. K. Narayan. In this semiautobiographical work, English teacher Krishna seeks to evolve from his humdrum life to a place of enlightenment.

9. A Teacher’s Novel Approach to Learning Works!

To Sir, with Love (1959), is a novel by E. R. Braithwaite. This semiautobiographical novel tells of a black teacher from Guyana and his working-class white students in a poor neighborhood of London. Most of the pupils in his class are unmotivated to learn, and are only semi-literate and semi-articulate. He persists despite their unresponsiveness to his approach, and eventually succeeds in his endeavours.

10. Teacher’s Motivation makes Forster a Writer

In 1902, Forster became an instructor at the Working Men’s College in London, an affiliation that lasted for twenty years. At the suggestion of Nathaniel Wedd, Forster’s teacher and friend at Cambridge, he also decided to become a writer. The years from 1903 to 1910 were years of extraordinary creative release for Forster. He wrote four novels of surpassing force and insight, all of them now recognized as Edwardian classics: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howards End (1910).

11. Story Inspired by His Teacher

My Children! My Africa! (1989) was the first Athol Fugard play to premiere in South Africa in years. The work was inspired by the story of a black teacher who refused to participate in a school boycott and was later murdered in Port Elizabeth by a group that believed he was a police informer.

12. Lampoons on his Physics Teacher

Alfred Jarry staged bawdy lampoons of Felix Hebert, his physics teacher, whom he regarded as incompetent and physically repulsive. Jarry remained  obsessed with the figure of Hebert for the rest of his life, using him as the model for the title character of Ubu Roi.

13. Professor becomes acclaimed Writer

In 1949 Mahapatra received a master’s degree in Physics and began to work as a lecturer at Ravenshaw College. Subsequently, he taught at other colleges in Orissa. He wrote poems while working as a teacher but had a late start as a professional writer—he was in his early forties before he started to publish his works. Successive volumes of his verse brought him recognition not only in India but also in other countries.

14. Parents as Inspirational Teachers

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto, Japan, on January 12, 1949, the only child of schoolteachers Chiaki and Miyuki Murakami. He grew up in the immediate aftermath of World War II, in which an aggressive Japan had battled the United States furiously in the Pacific. Murakami spent his early years listening to his parents discuss eighth-century poetry and medieval war tales at the dinner table.

15. Parents again, as Inspirational Teachers

Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan was born on October 10, 1906, in his grandfather’s home in Madras, the son of schoolteacher R. V. Krishnaswami Iyer and Gnana Iyer.

16. Highest Recommendations of his Teachers

Nietzsche had the highest recommendations of his Pforta teachers to enroll himself in the University of Bonn in 1864. There he pursued classical studies with philologist Albrecht Ritschl, and when the latter, within the year, moved to Leipzig, Nietzsche followed.

17. English Teacher recognizes and encourages Judith’s talent

Judith Arundell Wright was educated first at home and then as a boarder at the New England Girls’ Grammar School, where her English teacher recognized and encouraged her talent.

18. Title of Wonderful teacher

Roger Bacon also known as Doctor Mirabilis (wonderful teacher), the English philosopher and natural scientist, Roger Bacon placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empiricism, was given the scholastic accolade, ‘Wonderful teacher’.

19. Rushdie’s Mom a Teacher

Rushdie’s birth occurred just two months before India achieved its independence from England, a coincidence that later inspired his novel _Midnight’s Children._ He is the only son of Cambridge University–educated lawyer and businessman Anis Ahmed Rushdie and teacher Negin Butt Rushdie.

20. Dylan’s Dad an English Teacher

Dylan Thomas’s father, was an English teacher who had a great love for literature, and hence encouraged similar devotion in his son, even going so far as to read the works of Shakespeare aloud to the infant Thomas in his cradle. Such efforts were rewarded when Thomas began writing verse at an early age. He was an otherwise undistinguished student, however, and left school at sixteen to work for the South Wales Daily Post in Swansea.

21. Tolkien: An unassuming teacher of linguistics

Tolkien was a teacher of linguistics, whose life in most ways was uneventful and modest—into an international celebrity. Tolkien wrote in the foreword to the Ballantine edition of The Lord of the Rings trilogy that his task in writing his fairy-stories is ‘‘primarily linguistic in inspiration.’’

22. Walcott’s Mom, A teacher, encourages in him a love for reading

Derek Alton Walcott was born on January 23, 1930, on St. Lucia, a small island in the West Indies. His mother was a schoolteacher who encouraged his early education and love for reading. She was also involved in a community cultural group and got her son involved in local theater.

23. Story based on one’s Inspirational teacher!

Emlyn Williams’s The Corn Is Green attracted kudos from audiences and critics. The story focuses on the efforts of a schoolteacher, based on his own mentor, Cook, to found a school for the children of Welsh miners in the late nineteenth century and her efforts to help a boy, based on and played by Williams, win a scholarship.

* All factual inputs are from Gale’s, Britannica’s and Routledge’s alone!