There's always a lighter side to counter darkness. Atleast you can have a smile on your face when u expire.

Friday 6 July, 2007

Teachers say the darnest things

"Both of you three, leave the class!"
A modified and funnier version of that is, "Both of you three stand in a corner and form a circle!"
No one knows where they originated, though everyone claims that it was a teacher from their school who said that. Another popular quip is, "Why are you looking at the monkeys outside when I am here?"
So what compels a teacher to say such things to their students? Who cares, it's funny! Let them go ahead, it provides us with a distraction from their droning, and a distraction that we can't be blamed for.

We had a bio teacher who responded to the name Mrs.Madhusudan. She was actually a kannada teacher and had no knowledge of biology. But because of a lack of authentic bio teachers (authentic teachers in fact), and the abundance of learn-bio-in-30days books, she doubled as our bio teacher. And every day we would wait for someone in class to slip up, so that we could bare witness to her tirade of scintillating vituperation.
"Mrs. Madhusudan, I forgot my sharpener, could I please borrow one?"
"You want a sharpener?! How dare you forget your own. Who are you to take someone else's? Come and put your bloody pencil in my mouth, because my tongue is as sharp as a sharpener!"
No doubt the child found out how sharp it was.
There were times where she would go on for 15 mins, half a class, to the sadistic joy of everyone except the kid who committed the crime.

We had a chem teacher who would keep saying 'OK' after every second word. A friend once counted 58 'OKs in one speech.
"OK this is OK how you OK hold OK a test-tube OK. You OK use a OK test-tube OK holder OK and you OK clamp it OK over here OK." He clamped it to the mouth of the test-tube and held it for the class to see. CRASH! The test-tube slipped right out and splintered on impact with the ground.
"That's OK exactly OK what you OK are OK not supposed OK to do OK," he said, promptly.

It's better if the teacher's name sounds funny. Like Pakianathan, who kept telling us that he wanted a healthy relationship with us. We didn't want any sort of relationship with him. We were quite content with interbreeding within our class. Or Kulkarni, who never really taught anything. In fact, he wasn't even meant to teach something, though he could solve the rubix cube pretty quick. He presided over our study hours in the JEE concentration camp. Legend has it that Kulkarni used to be part of a menagerie, and taught monkeys how to speak English. He left that job because the monkeys indeed started speaking English, which freaked him out.
"You know, before this job i used to teach monkeys," he would tell us, snickering, with one eye squinted. "Now I still teach monkeys, heh heh heh."
He used to conduct these 'aptitude' tests, which had absolutely nothing to do with anything. There were questions like -
Q: Do you know how to fix a VCR?
Options: a) yes, b) no, c) what's a vcr?, d) don't know/ can't say or
Q:Do you plan your day?
Options: a) yes, b) no, c) all of the above, d) don't know/ can't say
Q: How many hours do you sleep in a day?
Options: a) 4, b) 5, c) I don't need sleep, I study all night for IIT-JEE, d) don't know/ can't say
Where the hell is the option for 10 hours?! He even went on to evaluate the paper! Apparently the correct answers for the above questions were - b, a and c respectively. My answers were a, c and b (which i ticked twice). I failed that test.
Kulkarni had an acid tongue as well. There was a Gopalkrishna once who was talking during class. Kukarni didn't like that. "Dei Krishna, get out of class I say. And take your flute and goats with you."

Physical Educations teachers take the cake. It's their actions as well as words that do the trick. We had one who kept his pants in his front pockets, and continuosly scratched his 'regions'. "In football you have to be mean and poor! You have to be cheap and grab the ball. Don't be nice. Be poor! Poor!" And everytime he said poor, he would stop scratching, and would grip and shake vigorously instead. We had one who came with us for a tournament. He used to be the world kho kho champion, or so he claimed. He walked up to the opponent coach and said, "Oy Sujata. I'll open my pants to you i say!"

Sometimes the teacher doesn't know what he/she is doing. They will take an entire class to solve a problem and they still won't finish it in the end. And then they have the cheek to say, "Such problems won't come in your exams." Or when a student asks them something that they don't know, they will either say, "That's not in your syllabus" or "How many times do you want me to explain this chapter. It's not my fault if you don't listen in class."
We had a teacher who was like that. She used to read from her notes and couldn't answer anything else. And we students would ask her the craziest questions. She was explaining the setup for an experiment one day, and telling us how we should place the metal inside the beaker, and then slowly pour acid. A classmate raised his hand, with a look on his face that he had found the most confounding question ever. The entire class waited with bated breath, and the teacher took a deep gulp. "Ma'am! I have found a major flaw in your experiment. What happens if we don't pour the acid in?" That was one time I don't blame the teacher for being speechless.

And recently we had a teacher tell us not to look into our text books while he was teaching. His reason, "Jesus wrote the Bible. When he preaches, do his followers look into it?"
Amen to that.