Confessions of an English teacher training students for CAT

At my new job, the days have a pleasing regularity. Unlike the earlier employer, here I am required to clock a certain number of hours every day.

I am still in the business of training students for the Common Admission Test (CAT), the entrance test for the IIMs, but things have changed.

At my earlier job, I used to go to office only when I was required to take classes. Otherwise, I worked from home.

This included, among other things, making English material for the classroom.

Now I do the same things but from the comfort, or otherwise, of the office.

It would be easy to say that working from home was more relaxing since one can laze around in pyjamas all day. But the truth is decidedly more complex.

For one, working from home afforded me the time and luxury to contribute writeups, like this piece.

Well, I can still take time out to write - even in office - but it is less a problem of propriety (using office hours to do non-office work) than of ability.

The office environment has a curious way of leaching your talent.

Let me explain. For the last two days, I have been in a training session where I was required to make presentations on introducing students to basic English grammar.

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Before a panel of three members, all of whom are senior to me in the profession by a good 10 years, I explained the nuts and bolts of such stuff as articles and prepositions, adjectives and adverbs.

The sessions passed smoothly enough - if anything, the feedback was positive. But by evening on both days, I felt distinctly uneasy.

I had been splicing and slashing, dissecting and demonstrating rules that were so obvious as to lose all charm in their retelling.

Whenever I wanted to introduce a new concept, say, the possibility of an adjective following the noun ("heir apparent"), I was reminded by the panel of the need to be student-friendly, and take things slow.

The panel was decent in every sense of the term, but they were also, in their set ideas and jelly-like smugness, rather contemptible.

Everything was put down to a T, with no scope for spontaneity or playfulness.

Every time I tried to bring context to bear upon my utterances, to introduce a story here, an account there, the esteemed panel shot me down, with the plea that context must be understood on one's own.

The task of the instructor, they repeated for the umpteenth time, is to give rules - staid, monotonous, cut and dry.

I saw their point, of course, since it is an English class I am running here.

But I fear that if I started performing as per their expectations, I would lose some inherent part of my skill as a writer.

How does an English instructor, without losing his mind, bridge the chasm between using language that sings and training English that, by its essential nature, limits?

I remember a particularly articulate student asking me once for permission to skip grammar classes.

"I don't get grammar," he had said. "I just speak."

How deeply those words resonate with me today! There is the personal space and there is the social place.

And I am having mighty trouble reconciling the two when it comes to, on the one hand, teaching English to MBA aspirants so they may clear CAT, and on the other, my fondness for the language itself.

Let me cite another example. The number one area of concern for CAT students is vocabulary - words like avarice, for instance.

I once discussed a handout in class which had the following question: "The scheme must be left autonomous, free from the ambitions of petty bureaucrats and the __________of politicians."

In a class of 35, only three students correctly marked the answer as "avarice".

I am told by my company that to work around this problem, I need to start teaching mnemonic tools.

"Choose any word," the manual on vocabulary explains, "say, 'inadvertent', and then connect it with something that sounds close.

Like an advertisement. For example, the advertisement for a Chinese noodles company that mistakenly shows Chinese models instead of Indians.

That would be an "inadvertent" error; the cue is "advertisement".

This is horrible. My students, most of them in any case, have little appreciation for language, preferring to use it as just another tool in their quest for success.

This mnemonics business, if I let it pass, would simply sap all meaning from the class. Utilitarianism at its worst.

I raised my reservation but it turns out the system works when one has to cram a thousand words in a month to have a crack at CAT's grinding vocabulary.

The company is even giving final touches to a software that will link words with cues.

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Salutary: "good" to have a soldier salute his senior. Irascible: "upset" at losing a race. Prudent: "careful" that his car does not get a dent. Oh, if I could only find a corner to hide!

But there is more. All writing must emerge from conflict.

At my new workplace, my life is extremely usual, perfect in its nitty gritty, worth looking forward to for its ability to bookend my hours.

When I wake up, unlike the time when I had to decide what to do with my time, now I can expect the humdrum tick-tock of the beating clock to guide me through the motions.

But this zombiefication, I fear, would be the death of me.

I fear that the beguiling routine of the upcoming day is caressing me out of thinking.

I fear that I am allowing its kind, gentle hand to guide me away from the cesspool that is the progenitor of all writing.

Beyond my discomfort with the lessons I dish out on language is the more significant question of where this process is leading me, the aspiring writer.