The Haversack Lesson

My Students, My Teachers — Forty years of stories from a teacher who believed that every lesson worth remembering began with a human being, not a textbook.

In the early 1980s, fresh out of college and rather more hopeful than experienced, I found myself teaching at one of Madurai’s most reputed schools. The first year, in middle school, was smooth and reassuring — the children were manageable, the lessons fell into place, and I began to believe, with the comfortable optimism of the newly employed, that I had found my footing. Then, feeling a little ambitious, I agreed to take Grade XII the following year.

This was a different matter entirely.

The school drew from Madurai’s most affluent families. Many of the students had been taught in their primary years by Anglo-Indian teachers, and it showed — their English was easy, idiomatic, unhurried. They spoke the language as a native possession rather than an acquired one. As their English teacher, I did not need to dazzle them with vocabulary or impress them with an affected accent. What I needed, and knew I needed, was simply to be accepted.

I decided to be myself. No borrowed grandeur, no performance. Just sincere preparation and an honest presence. It sounded simple enough, sitting in the staff room the evening before. Walking toward Grade XII on the first morning was another experience altogether.

This was a school where students expressed their opinions freely and without apology. They could, if a class failed to hold them, simply opt out. The stakes, in other words, were real. I entered the classroom with butterflies conducting a small riot in my stomach, steadied my gait, cleared my throat, and held my head at the precise angle I hoped communicated quiet authority.

My eyes went, as eyes always do, to the back row.

They were there — tall, smart, unhurried in the way that confident teenagers learn to be, occupying the back benches with the ease of people who have long since decided that the room belongs to them. Formidable, if one was inclined to be formidable about such things. I smiled, hoping to establish goodwill early. They wished me back, without great enthusiasm, and settled.

The lesson was about trekking. I had prepared well. The class, to my genuine surprise and relief, engaged warmly — questions were asked, opinions offered, the room alive with the particular energy of students who actually want to be part of something. I began to relax.

Then I said the word haversack.

From the back row, a hand went up. Muneef — tall, unhurried, entirely at ease with himself — stopped me. “Isn’t it hoversack?” he said.

A small word. A casual question. And yet it landed on me with the full weight of every insecurity I had carried into that room. My first instinct was to argue. My second instinct, arriving a fraction of a second later and considerably louder, was fear. These boys went camping. They were senior to me in confidence if nothing else. And it was the first day.

I pretended it had been a slip of the tongue, corrected myself, and moved on.

Without another crossfire, I finished the class. Then I rushed to the staffroom, pulled out my Daniel Jones pronunciation dictionary, and confirmed what some part of me had known all along: I had been right. It was haversack. I had surrendered without cause — and foolishly.

The next morning I walked back into that classroom with considerably more conviction. I called Muneef by name and announced, clearly and without drama, that I had checked and I had been correct all along. Muneef nodded, entirely untroubled, and gave it not a second thought. It had been, for him, a casual doubt tossed into the air with no particular intent. It was I who had turned it into a crisis.

That was the first lesson Muneef taught me, without knowing he had taught me anything at all.

As the year went on, I stopped dreading his presence and began to look forward to it. He read widely and with genuine appetite, and he had the habit of producing words that were new to me — not to show off, simply because that was the kind of mind he had. Our exchanges became something I anticipated; a class with Muneef in it was never dull, and I believe, though I cannot say for certain, that it was mutually worthwhile.

The back-benchers, I also discovered, had no particular ambition to corner their teachers. They were, beneath their formidable appearance, a cheerful, good-natured group of young men enjoying their last year of school with considerable relish. I had dressed them in my own anxieties and found, once I put those down, that they were simply good company.

In my salad days, that year gave me the most enduring of lessons. Prepare well — always. But when a student challenges you and you are not certain, do not surrender and do not bluster. The right answer is simple: I am not sure. Let me check and come back to you. Intellectual honesty is respected far more than flat capitulation, and far more than false authority.

Muneef was oblivious to all of this, of course. He continued through that year in his inimitable, nonchalant way — enlivening the class, occasionally enlightening the teacher, entirely unaware that he had, in a single casual question about a word, changed the way I would stand in a classroom for the rest of my life.

A class without a Muneef to keep you honest is a quieter place. But it is also a smaller one.