Priceless Harbingers of Priceless Learning: Teachers
The education given by Aristotle to
Alexander played a pivotal role in shaping him (the young prince of Macedonia) into
the formidable emperor known as ‘Alexander the Great’.
It was the teachings of Chanakya that
guided Chandragupta in his life as Chandragupta Maurya – The greatest of the
Mauryan rulers.
It was the teachings and guidance of your
teachers that has made you into a successful person today.
To put it in a lucid manner, the role of
teachers is an important one for mankind, irrespective of great emperors or
normal persons.
The roles of teachers therefore can’t be
undermined in any manner. So, it befits all students to accept the role of
their students into making their lives.
Countless success-stories can be mentioned,
but let’s take two of them as examples: The renowned writer Jhumpa Lahiri and
our former-president A. P. J. Abdul Kalam.
Muthu Iyer – This person was the teacher of
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam during his elementary school years. In his website: www.abdulkalam.com, he fondly remembers
his elementary school days when his teacher, Mr. Iyer gave him a three-page
long exercise for improvement of handwriting even though he taught a different
subject.
Born as Nilanjana Sudeshna, Jhumpa Lahiri’s
kindergarden teachers addressed her as Jhumpa. The writer fondly remembers that
her nickname became the source for ‘Gogol’ the central character in her novel
The Namesake. She, herself, has played the role of a teacher by taking classes
on creative writing at the Boston University and the Rhode Island School of
Design.
These two accounts – the former one being a
nostalgic recollection and the latter one being a short snapshot – are nothing
but two gateways leading to the world of thoughts – Thoughts about the role of
teachers in our lives.
Irrespective of learning theories, styles
etc. information-dissemination would have been quite pointless had there not
been teachers.
A Neanderthal would have not evolved had he
not taught the knowledge of weapons to his fellow Neanderthal. An Egyptian
architect would have wasted his knowledge had he not collated multiple assets
of his knowledge using Hieroglyphics. A scientist would have wasted his
lifetime of efforts of analysis had he not passed on the information to his
students.
At a closing note, all the above simply
forth the following fact in different manners and forms: Teachers are priceless!
