STRANDOMS: the stray and random thoughts
04 January 2019
Prof. S. Ramkumar
Lifestyle
Vuja de on “Yes sir!”
How the sheets of the attendance register of students we taught live with us.
Recently in a get together, in the ambience of pleasantry exchanges, a shy participant, hesitantly came to me and whispered, I was a student of yours and you may not remember me sir. His face was familiar, though he had grown up to be plump, mature and stout. He cordially told his name. Then the magic – words flicked my brain, opening the box of identity. Yes, it was almost 25 years back since I called this name (along with many others), regularly for a long period as their course teacher. I could describe his nature, how good he was in some things and how he could have cared some more on certain things as a student. He was surprised and astonishingly asked me how I remembered him ?
Well, it was spontaneous tracing from the memory lane. I also learnt that repeated calls of names for attendance were an interactive meaningful exercise I was undertaking within a short period of time in the beginning or the end of lecture/class. It’s just that you tell a name and it introduces you to certain traits of the students. Calling the attendance – often considered a monotonous and official requirement to calculate the minimum percentage to appear for an exam – has lots more for a teacher. We all have started saying “Yes Sir” for a teacher’s call on our name, from a time when we cannot imagine, even as kids! Now many of our children and grand children continue the legacy.
From Anitha to Maria, Shafy to Venkatesh, Abhiramy to …., it is over three decades that this class room experience has been going on for me.
Marking attendance is a brief but rich opportunity of instant connectivity with the student. The tone (weak, feeble, loud, clear, slow, fast..) of the student, their body language, face expression (the eyes especially- sparks, brightness, droopiness, expectations, hope, frustration), gestures etc speaks a lot within a few seconds during that mandatory “Yes sir”.
As McLuhan said: “the medium is the message”. You do this for 6 months or a year, the name along with the nature imprints within you as a part of you for your life. Well, as a teacher you have additional observations and opportunities to pick and choose from with them. However, we are blessed with the boon of forgetting, and many are kept in the long term repository memory of life. But then what you repeated several times lives within you, and instantly refreshes the feeling of familiarity once someone utters the name. It is just like chanting mantras or verses from a favorite book repeatedly.
Efforts are going on in many institutions, as a matter of fact, in line with present time, to save the time of calling attendance through electronic mode of marking. Understandably if you have more numbers of students it has to be addressed.
For me though, I have felt that the response of “Yes Sir” to attendance-calls as:
1 an amazing experience of varied beauty with which students respond to their names,
2 an immediate perception to their status/mood; and above all, the best one
3 an unique experience to store the names of the wonderful students down your memory lane, which can be opened by a click of name in the future.