The fun of outdoor classes

AFTER the post-Covid reopening of schools, attempts were made at some places, weather permitting, to shift students from the classroom to outdoors so that social distancing could be maintained. Students love a bit of a change and feel refreshed if a regular class is held outdoors.

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When I was in school, our class was occasionally held on the campus lawns in the warm sunshine during winter, when the weather was too cold to sit inside the classroom. Our teacher would sit on a chair facing all of us squatting on the lawn; at times we rubbed our palms to keep ourselves warm. The bonus was that no blackboard faced us; so, subjects like geometry could not be taught.

In the hot summer months, our PT classes were held under the shade of a cluster of four jamun trees. Once in a while, a ripe jamun would drop and children would scramble to grab and eat it.

When I was in Class VIII, we students, who had picked gardening as a crafts subject, were allotted a flowerbed each. The teacher explained to us the steps taken to nurture the plants, such as watering them, and monitor their growth. Excited, each one would visit his flowerbed daily to look at the plants. Soon, bright yellow flowers were showing up on the marigold plants. Some plants yielded multi-coloured flowers, and we were eager to know their names.

In college, during the early 1960s, ours was a small class with 11 boys and two girls. Two boys had mastered the knack of convincing a young lecturer that the cold weather inside the classroom was not conducive for studying, and our class should shift to the lawns under the warm sun. He would often relent. The next demand made to him would be that he should treat us to samosas and tea. He did agree on a couple of occasions, perhaps not to lose face before the two girl students!

Emboldened by their success, the two boys started pestering a professor, a PhD holder in maths and recluse who chain-smoked, to ‘donate’ to us the cost of cigarettes smoked by him in a day so that the students could have a small party. The boys argued that not smoking 60 cigarettes, which he did daily, would also be good for his health. Sure enough, this teacher, on a cold day in 1964, cut short his lecture and told us to have samosas and Coke and give him the bill later. It was indeed great fun the next day to learn the tough concepts of legendre polynomials and bessel functions in the maths class!