Book Box: The teacher I didn’t want to be

I’d read To Sir, With Love and was touched by this story of a teacher in London’s impoverished East End changing lives. Later I read Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire, where author Rafe Esquith teaches low-income kids in Los Angeles, using art and music to inspire children.

I remembered my own debts to my teachers – Teacher Nargis at my convent school who made dry history that was full of dates to be memorised suddenly sound like a story, and later at IIM Calcutta professors like Indivar Kamtekar, who awoke in all of us a sudden burning love for Indian economic and political history.

And yet I didn’t want to be a teacher. It wasn’t glamorous enough, it didn’t pay enough. I chose instead to be a banker and then a marketer of bone china tableware.

And then our daughters were born and we moved from being DINKS (Double Income No Kids) to SINKS (Single Income Numerous Kids). Money became tight. As I drilled my daughters in mathematics, getting them to listen to Multiplication Rock to learn their tables and to convert fractional quantities in cake recipes so the servings could be larger, I thought – why not include the neighborhood kids too? And charge them a fee?

So Maths Cats began. And then Reading Cats.

I poured hours into preparing lesson plans, into making sure the kids had a lot of fun as they read and multiplied and divided. The classes grew in size and I was consumed. Till it came to a point where I had to choose – scale up or shut down. The answer became obvious because I knew I didn’t want to be administering some sort of teaching franchise. I stopped teaching. My days were so full and frenetic, I didn’t give it much thought.

It was only years later when I found myself in classrooms around the country, that I realised how much I’d missed teaching, how much I missed the electric intensity of live sessions that go well. And how much I missed the feeling of shared exhilaration when my students got it and moved to the next level.

My book Career Rules: How to Choose Right and Get the Life You Want had just been released and I had been invited to conduct sessions in different schools as part of a Jaipur Literature Festival Outreach initiative. One day I was at Rukmini Devi High School in Delhi, the second at a municipal school in Jahangirpuri, the third at Maharani Gayatri Devi School in Jaipur – all so different and yet the intensity everywhere felt the same, as the children and I wrote down stories of defining moments in our lives and together rediscovered the power of stories to provoke discussions, to change lives, and to get you the job you want. In those days, I was Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi and was awed all over again with the power of the perfect teacher paired with the right stories, drinking in how a classroom could become a space for freedom, imagination and resistance.

The sessions with school children, with college students at Ashoka University, St. Xavier’s Mumbai, and at business schools brought back to me just how fulfilling being a teacher was, even though it paid me even less than writing did.

So now that is what I am – a teacher of Storytelling in Business and of Persuasive Communication.

And I know it sounds cheesy, but my biggest reward is the little notes and emails I receive from my students; they make my day, my week, my year, these notes that say things like – “thank you for helping me articulate my thoughts and become more confident,” “that one class where we read snippets of different autobiographies really got me back into reading—thank you for that,” and “thank you for making my MBA worth it.”

This Teacher’s Day weekend, I find myself thinking of Teacher Nargis and Professor Kamtekar, and the many other teachers who rewired how I saw the world. What about you, dear reader, who were your most influential teachers? And what have you told them lately?

Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist, Founder of Sonya’s Book Box, and a teacher of Storytelling in Business. Got a knot in your life, a dilemma at work, or a reading slump you can’t shake? Send your questions and book requests to sonyasbookbox@gmail.com, and she promises to give each one her most earnest consideration.