Magnanimous Miss Mary
What can I say about Miss Mary? She was patient, calm, kind, soft-spoken, lenient and a terrific teacher. I met her some years ago at our Reunion and she looked juuuuuust the same… like she did some 30yrs ago!
I first met her when I was in Class VII. Forgive me for using the term ‘class’ … that’s what we said back in those days.
She entered VII C one boring morning, wearing a simple saree; petite, pretty and shy. All the noise stopped in a moment; perhaps we wanted to make an impression. She stood at the teacher’s desk and flashed the prettiest smile with a set of the whitest teeth. My my! her teeth were so nice and so white; I hadn’t seen a more perfect set in my life.
Miss Mary taught us Maths and Physics in middle school. It must have been her only job as she retired from our school a few months ago. Maybe she was our first South Indian teacher, because to be honest, before her, we girls had never really heard a native South Indian speak English. Now that’s where all the fun begins…
After a brief introduction about herself, she dived right into Physics. I guess she wanted to get the pulse of the class; ascertain our level of knowledge and competence. She asked us a question, “Define olium (o-lee-um).”
Anyone know what that is?😛
Now, we had just started studying Chemistry, Physics and Biology as separate subjects as earlier it used to be one Science, so we thought this was something we hadn’t been taught. With blank looks about our faces, my desk partner and I stared at each other and at her. Everyone was blank and there was a significant murmur traversing in the class. We were trying to put across the fact that we had never heard the word before. She looked confused, as if unable to accept that we didn’t know what ‘olium’ meant. For a question as simple, she must have had a real bad first impression of our standard in Physics.
She was clearly frustrated and started asking the question individually. In between, she said to us, but because she was soft-spoken it almost sounded like she was talking to herself, “This is the basics, how can you all not know this?” and after about five futile attempts at asking, she wrote the word on the board.
As ‘olium’ unfolded in front of our eyes, we let out the most amused sigh ever, because, forget in reality, not even in our wildest dreams had we thought that…
the word was VOLUME! 😅
Volume… olium!
Olium… volume!
(happens when u eat up the v)
What she was desperately asking for the last 20 minutes or so was something that we all knew but because of her accent couldn’t understand. So almost unanimously we said, “Ohhhhh volume!” (stressing as much as we could on the ‘v’ sound) followed by loud squeals and laughter errupting from all across the class.
Poor soul, she had no idea what caused the commotion. She became nervous as it was her first class with us but she maintained her composure as she always did when we laughed and made noise. She was amazingly cool.
I don’t know if Miss Mary ever found out what had actually happened in the class that day… but boy! this was just the beginning of many such episodes of laughter and mockery until we got used to her way of speaking.
Another one of my favorites was again a question in physics, when she asked us to find the distance between two points P and Q, and of all the letters in the English alphabet, she had to use these two that day🤦♀️. Well, let me ‘audio’ the incident so that the essence isn’t lost.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YhfvlOUbeawaui9uW8H6EShYG1YRhi3S/view?usp=drivesdk (click to listen)
In retrospect, I know it was mean of us to mock her but it wasn’t entirely our fault either. After all, we were just a bunch of naive, dorky, giggly, frivolous middle school girls of VII C, Loreto Convent Darjeeling, while she, our magnanimous Miss Mary!
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This blog post is a part of the blog challenge ‘Blogaberry Dazzle’ hosted by Cindy D’Silva and Noor Anand Chawla
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