Empirical wisdom of a teacher

MODERN-DAY texting has played havoc with the English language, but I doubt if it’s anything new. Our daughter was just five when, on a week’s leave from Nagaland, I casually flipped through her English notebook. I noticed a red circle by the teacher.

“How do you spell ‘well’?” I asked her. She answered correctly.

“Then why did you spell it as W-E-L here?”

“I was in a hurry, papa.”

“You need to be more careful” I said, unable to keep the military sternness out of my voice. The child made a crying face. “Don’t trouble her,” the wife said protectively, “In any case, she knows the spellings. How does it matter what the teacher thinks?” As someone who was bringing up the children singlehandedly, she deservedly had the last word. The incident evoked a recall.

In the mid-1960s, spending my leave in the village, I would often visit a professor in Rohtak. He had been with my eldest brother in college. One day, I found him on his knees on the carpet, with answer sheets scattered all around. He barely looked up to respond to my greetings and said, “Tell your bhabhi to get coffee.” He was visibly fatigued.

After some minutes, he suddenly asked, “Can you read Gurmukhi?” I recalled that Punjabi language had been introduced in our Class-V syllabus in 1951. Though we had never got past the first story, Pannalal di Kahani, I could still read, and told him so.

“Good, you do the checking now.”

“But I do not even know the subject,” I protested.

“Don’t worry,” he said, getting up and stretching himself. I was still sceptical as we exchanged places.

There were 10 questions, each carrying 10 marks; short-answer and objective-type questions had not yet been introduced. I would read the first few words haltingly and he would intervene, “It is question number 3. How long is the answer?”

If it covered half a page, the examinee got five marks. A full-page answer got seven and a reward of six for something in between. The pass percentage in that era was 33, with 45 per cent being the second division and the first starting at 60 per cent.

His wife brought coffee and asked him in mock admonition that comes after three decades of a happy marriage, “Why have you put him on the ground to do your work?”

“He will be free in a few minutes,” the professor said. He knew that I was the only bachelor left among the brothers. The bhabhi — a compulsive matchmaker — loved discussing the subject of my marriage. She even kept a list of eligible girls.

I could not hold back my curiosity. “Bhai sahib, don’t you risk getting caught marking matriculation papers in this manner? What if someone complains?”

He had a very reassuring answer, based on his long academic experience: “The risk of getting caught arises only if someone fails. No middle-bracket scorer ever complains.”