Why do teachers occupy such a dominant position in our minds? Long after they’ve passed through our lives, we can hear their voices as if we last saw them only yesterday. And, of course, we can picture their faces and their bodies as accurately as if they were standing before us.
Is it because when we first encounter teachers, our minds are practically empty, and it is teachers who fill them with anything worth remembering? I suppose that applies –plus the fact that we are in the hands of teachers for the longest time in all the periods that we spend as part of an organised body. We may be employed by organisations, but never in as continuous a stream as in educational institutions.
Speaking for myself, my Class One teacher, Teacher Kwasi Akwa, was almost like a god to me. He was a magnificent specimen of a young man “full of beans”. He was a scoutmaster and always wore his scout uniform to school. His scout shoes made a stylish “kah-kah-kah” noise when he walked, and since he was always in a hurry, The Second World War was still raging when we first went to school, and I am sure he was very annoyed that because of his profession, he wasn’t allowed to enlist as a soldier. We could hear him as he made his way on the cement floor of the school veranda even when he was far away.
His method of teaching was also based on the military principle of do not: “you must not wipe your slates with saliva; if you are using a pencil, you must not press it hard on the paper; do not rub out anything but cancel it; you must especially take care not to use your fingers to rub out what you have written in pencil, and leave a black mark in your exercise book.” And so on.
We must also be clean: he forbade us from using our school uniforms to erase fro0m our slates, what we had written with chalk. He even beat us if, by accident, our shirt-fronts got smeared with chalk. “Pah! Pah!” – the voice of the raffia cane – was never absent from our classroom.
I must say this for Mr Akwa, though: he was a very enthusiastic teacher. He did his best to ensure that we all understood what he said -- and practised it. What he never got into his head was that some of the kids could not perform because they were terrified of him. I personally was so terrified of him that when my younger cousin, a particularly obnoxious girl, realised my fear of him, she would end any argument I had with her, by teasing me with the mere mention of the dreaded name: ‘Teacher Akwa!’
In order to avoid being caned by this teacher, I turned myself into a walking ‘Teacher’s Notebook’. Whatever came from Mr Akwa’s notebook into my head stayed there for ever. I would repeat it to myself silently again and again, on the way to the river to bath before going to school; I would repeat it on my way to school; and I would repeat it during school exercise time. The only time I stopped the flood of information from playing in my head was when Mr Akwa was imparting new knowledge to us.
As if I were a parrot, I reproduced all that Mr Akwa had taught us on to my slate, and later into my exercise books. When I did this, Mr Akwa became exceedingly pleased. He praised me to the high heavens. On one occasion, he gave us 20 sums to work out. I managed to score all 20 correct. The boy who got the next highest marks got only 18. So Mr Akwa put me on a desk all by myself and put the guy who got 18 behind me. In other words, no-one was fit to sit next me. It didn’t worry him that this might make me cocky and thereby insufferable to my classmates.
Worse, he opened my desk and wrote on the lid of the pocket into which we deposited our books, “DANGER DD BOY”. I never fully understood what it meant, but he went and brought some boys from Standard Three – our most senior class – to show them what he had written. They all nodded and said nice things and then went back to their classroom. I was never bullied by a Standard Three boy or girl in the school after that.
But all that attention meant that I became extremely self-conscious and existed in a daze most of the time. If it were these days, I would say I lived in a bubble of euphoria. I began to think of knowledge gained in school as being of such overwhelming importance that I used a piece of charcoal to write on the floor of my mother’s kitchen – after she had laboriously polished the floor with special red clay that could only be found far in the bush, near a river.
Meanwhile, I polished and constantly re-polished my slate beautifully to please Teacher Akwa, using a black dye that I made out of seeds collected in the bush. In my over-enthusiasm, I overdid the polishing sometimes, with the result that the chalk screeched when I wrote on the slate with it, and produced only faint writing.
My mother, as down-to-earth a person as you could ever want to meet, stopped my nonsense by simply asking me, “So that school you’re going to, can it turn your eyes into those of a whiteman?” This was heavy stuff she was asking of me. Whitemen made motor-cars; they created money; they healed all manner of diseases in their hospitals. Was the charcoal rubbish with which I was smearing my mother’s kitchen floor equal to their knowledge? If not, then why was I giving her such a hard time running the beautiful work she had done on her kitchen floor?
Halfway through our class one course, Mr Akwa decided that I had absorbed everything he had for me in class one and that I should be promoted to class two. That decision was one of the most stupid he ever made. The school syllabus could not be circumvented, and when I went to class two, I soon discovered that there were things in the Larcombe’s School Arithmetic Book Two which we in class one hadn’t yet studied, using Book One as we did. I couldn’t work any of the sums, as a result. But the class two teacher was a lazy old sod who wasn’t going to spend extra time bringing med up to date. In fact, he hardly ever taught anything, but left it to his ‘big boys’. And these big boys went about their business as if I didn’t exist.
I became even dazed than I had been in class one – this time, with sheer
bewilderment. I have never been so happy as to be sent back to class one.
But Mr Akwa hadn’t finished with his “Danger DD Boy” saga. At the end of the year, he jumped me from class one straight to class three. This meant I had to re-congregate with the same class two pupils with whom I hadn’t been able to cope the previous year. This time round, however, we were on a level playing field: we all learnt the same things from the same teacher at the same time. So, in our first examination, I topped the class. And I was never displaced at the top. I was very sorry that by then Mr Akwa had been transferred elsewhere, and so couldn’t see me, his parrot, justify the faith he had so abundantly placed in me. But I am sure he heard about it, for teachers often corresponded with each other.
Our class three teacher was all right, but he loved caning too much. Because I had topped the class, he assigned all the ‘important’ tasks to me – taking the class register to the headmaster’s office, going to sweep his room, and that sort of thing.
But it also meant that it was I who had to go and cut raffia canes for him from the school “store” to enable him to whip my classmates. Now, every time I brought him a new cane, he tried it on me first before using it on his main victims! I hated this: first of all, I didn’t ask myself to go and cut the cane for the damned man; second, because I didn’t like to be caned, I spent inordinate hours chewing my tables by heart and reading my textbooks ahead of time, in order to be prepared for any questions the teacher might ask. And yet, after all that, I got caned just like everyone else. I used to cry my eyes out at the injustice of it all. To be caned when you have done no wrong: it was a monstrous bit of wickedness on the teacher’s part.
Well, we moved on. Our standard one teacher was, professionally speaking, the worst I encountered in my whole school career. Worse even than the class two teacher. He was a fussy character who was always leaving us without a teacher and going off to deal with matters in other teachers’ classrooms. His house was also close by, and he was always leaving us untaught to go home to do God knows what.
I soon discovered that I could leave the classroom for long hours on end without his caring about my whereabouts.,
Is it because when we first encounter teachers, our minds are practically empty, and it is teachers who fill them with anything worth remembering? I suppose that applies –plus the fact that we are in the hands of teachers for the longest time in all the periods that we spend as part of an organised body. We may be employed by organisations, but never in as continuous a stream as in educational institutions.
Speaking for myself, my Class One teacher, Teacher Kwasi Akwa, was almost like a god to me. He was a magnificent specimen of a young man “full of beans”. He was a scoutmaster and always wore his scout uniform to school. His scout shoes made a stylish “kah-kah-kah” noise when he walked, and since he was always in a hurry, The Second World War was still raging when we first went to school, and I am sure he was very annoyed that because of his profession, he wasn’t allowed to enlist as a soldier. We could hear him as he made his way on the cement floor of the school veranda even when he was far away.
His method of teaching was also based on the military principle of do not: “you must not wipe your slates with saliva; if you are using a pencil, you must not press it hard on the paper; do not rub out anything but cancel it; you must especially take care not to use your fingers to rub out what you have written in pencil, and leave a black mark in your exercise book.” And so on.
We must also be clean: he forbade us from using our school uniforms to erase fro0m our slates, what we had written with chalk. He even beat us if, by accident, our shirt-fronts got smeared with chalk. “Pah! Pah!” – the voice of the raffia cane – was never absent from our classroom.
I must say this for Mr Akwa, though: he was a very enthusiastic teacher. He did his best to ensure that we all understood what he said -- and practised it. What he never got into his head was that some of the kids could not perform because they were terrified of him. I personally was so terrified of him that when my younger cousin, a particularly obnoxious girl, realised my fear of him, she would end any argument I had with her, by teasing me with the mere mention of the dreaded name: ‘Teacher Akwa!’
In order to avoid being caned by this teacher, I turned myself into a walking ‘Teacher’s Notebook’. Whatever came from Mr Akwa’s notebook into my head stayed there for ever. I would repeat it to myself silently again and again, on the way to the river to bath before going to school; I would repeat it on my way to school; and I would repeat it during school exercise time. The only time I stopped the flood of information from playing in my head was when Mr Akwa was imparting new knowledge to us.
As if I were a parrot, I reproduced all that Mr Akwa had taught us on to my slate, and later into my exercise books. When I did this, Mr Akwa became exceedingly pleased. He praised me to the high heavens. On one occasion, he gave us 20 sums to work out. I managed to score all 20 correct. The boy who got the next highest marks got only 18. So Mr Akwa put me on a desk all by myself and put the guy who got 18 behind me. In other words, no-one was fit to sit next me. It didn’t worry him that this might make me cocky and thereby insufferable to my classmates.
Worse, he opened my desk and wrote on the lid of the pocket into which we deposited our books, “DANGER DD BOY”. I never fully understood what it meant, but he went and brought some boys from Standard Three – our most senior class – to show them what he had written. They all nodded and said nice things and then went back to their classroom. I was never bullied by a Standard Three boy or girl in the school after that.
But all that attention meant that I became extremely self-conscious and existed in a daze most of the time. If it were these days, I would say I lived in a bubble of euphoria. I began to think of knowledge gained in school as being of such overwhelming importance that I used a piece of charcoal to write on the floor of my mother’s kitchen – after she had laboriously polished the floor with special red clay that could only be found far in the bush, near a river.
Meanwhile, I polished and constantly re-polished my slate beautifully to please Teacher Akwa, using a black dye that I made out of seeds collected in the bush. In my over-enthusiasm, I overdid the polishing sometimes, with the result that the chalk screeched when I wrote on the slate with it, and produced only faint writing.
My mother, as down-to-earth a person as you could ever want to meet, stopped my nonsense by simply asking me, “So that school you’re going to, can it turn your eyes into those of a whiteman?” This was heavy stuff she was asking of me. Whitemen made motor-cars; they created money; they healed all manner of diseases in their hospitals. Was the charcoal rubbish with which I was smearing my mother’s kitchen floor equal to their knowledge? If not, then why was I giving her such a hard time running the beautiful work she had done on her kitchen floor?
Halfway through our class one course, Mr Akwa decided that I had absorbed everything he had for me in class one and that I should be promoted to class two. That decision was one of the most stupid he ever made. The school syllabus could not be circumvented, and when I went to class two, I soon discovered that there were things in the Larcombe’s School Arithmetic Book Two which we in class one hadn’t yet studied, using Book One as we did. I couldn’t work any of the sums, as a result. But the class two teacher was a lazy old sod who wasn’t going to spend extra time bringing med up to date. In fact, he hardly ever taught anything, but left it to his ‘big boys’. And these big boys went about their business as if I didn’t exist.
I became even dazed than I had been in class one – this time, with sheer
bewilderment. I have never been so happy as to be sent back to class one.
But Mr Akwa hadn’t finished with his “Danger DD Boy” saga. At the end of the year, he jumped me from class one straight to class three. This meant I had to re-congregate with the same class two pupils with whom I hadn’t been able to cope the previous year. This time round, however, we were on a level playing field: we all learnt the same things from the same teacher at the same time. So, in our first examination, I topped the class. And I was never displaced at the top. I was very sorry that by then Mr Akwa had been transferred elsewhere, and so couldn’t see me, his parrot, justify the faith he had so abundantly placed in me. But I am sure he heard about it, for teachers often corresponded with each other.
Our class three teacher was all right, but he loved caning too much. Because I had topped the class, he assigned all the ‘important’ tasks to me – taking the class register to the headmaster’s office, going to sweep his room, and that sort of thing.
But it also meant that it was I who had to go and cut raffia canes for him from the school “store” to enable him to whip my classmates. Now, every time I brought him a new cane, he tried it on me first before using it on his main victims! I hated this: first of all, I didn’t ask myself to go and cut the cane for the damned man; second, because I didn’t like to be caned, I spent inordinate hours chewing my tables by heart and reading my textbooks ahead of time, in order to be prepared for any questions the teacher might ask. And yet, after all that, I got caned just like everyone else. I used to cry my eyes out at the injustice of it all. To be caned when you have done no wrong: it was a monstrous bit of wickedness on the teacher’s part.
Well, we moved on. Our standard one teacher was, professionally speaking, the worst I encountered in my whole school career. Worse even than the class two teacher. He was a fussy character who was always leaving us without a teacher and going off to deal with matters in other teachers’ classrooms. His house was also close by, and he was always leaving us untaught to go home to do God knows what.
I soon discovered that I could leave the classroom for long hours on end without his caring about my whereabouts.,
