The Journey

Jayanta Kumar Banerjee

Description

The Journey tells the stories of professional and personal ventures from my mother's Kindergarten homeschooling till post-Doctoral studies and beyond in nine different countries. It is a saga of friendship with so many families and colleagues in diverse cultures, a true anecdote of universal brotherhood.

Sujets

• Educators
• Biography
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Palibrio
• Date de parution: 06 février 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781506549620
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE JOURNEY











JAYANTA BANERJEE



Copyright © 2023 by Jayanta Banerjee.

Library of Congress Control Number:
2023900589
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-5065-4961-3
Softcover
978-1-5065-4960-6
eBook
978-1-5065-4962-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.




Rev. date: 19/01/2023




Palibrio
1663 Liberty Drive, Suite 200
Bloomington, IN 47403
849686



IN MEMORIUM
In loving memory of my grandmother
KRISHNA-MANINI DEVI



CONTENTS
Acknowledgements

1 Early Education
2 Professional Education And Training
3 Graduate Studies At Waterloo
4 Latin America

Postscript
Las Semblanazas



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My sincere thanks to my daughter, Dr. Anyana Banerjee, for revising and editing the final draft.
Also, I am very thankful to my wife, Matilde Muñiz Troche (Matty), for her understanding and patience, while I was busy in word-processing and editing the manuscript.
Finally, I am ever grateful my ex-wife, Eligia Briceno, for taking so good care of our children and educating them during their adolescent years.



1
EARLY EDUCATION
I still remember with crystal clarity my first admission day in primary school. Yes, the school was very well known in the neighborhood and so, they had an admission test even for the kids. I was entering grade 3. My mother did the homeschooling for the first two grades and prepared me well for the third grade. I was sitting in a large room with many other kids who also applied for admission. I was looking around, full of curiosity with surprising eyes, and saw at a distance an elderly person sitting in front of a large table and talking to a little boy in front of him. It immediately occurred to me that the elderly person must be a teacher, and hence must be asking a lot of tough questions of the poor little boy.
Soon, my turn came. I approached the table and man with fear but the elderly man gave me a broad smile and said, “please sit down, my son!” This ‘ my son!’ totally took away my fear and I felt very relaxed. He asked, again with a smile, “How are you feeling today?” “Good, Sir.” I replied, with my head a bit bent down for not looking straight in his eyes. “What did you read this morning?” he asked. I replied, this time looking straight at him, “A poem, Sir.”. “Great! Can you recite it for me, my son?” This second time ‘my son’ gave me a wave of joy, and I recited the full poem that my mom taught me the night before. When I finished, he was overjoyed. He stood up from his chair, and looked at me, again with a smile, and said, “You are all set for Grade 3! Come to school next Monday. Oh, by the way, bring with you a small exercise book for writing and, of course, a pencil.” Apparently, I must have had my happiness reflected on my face, for he moved forward and gave me a little pat on the shoulder, and said, “Now go home and enjoy the day!” I turned around and left that large room. My father was waiting outside the door.
Later, after many months in Grade 3, I came to know why the entrance examiner was so happy with my reciting the poem. That very poem was in the textbook for Grade 3! He took me as an ‘advanced student’ for the class!
The school was only a five-minute walk from our house. Just across the road there was a park, and the school was located right beside the park. I could go to that very prestigious school only for its proximity! The name of the school was Mitra Institution where many famous Indians, from musicians to politicians, attended during British rule and, also after independence. Freedom fighter like Shyma Prasad Mukherjee, musicians like Hemant Kumar, went to that school. India gained freedom in 1947, and in the same year I started in Grade 3. I was only seven. It was a glorious year in Indian history and a year for me to remember at the onset of my formal education!
Homeschooling with my mother was great. There was no fixed time, no big schedule. Whenever she had time after house-spousing her daily duties she would sit with me, and we would start together reading, writing and a bit of arithmetic. She taught me the very basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. We used to sing together the multiplication table in Bengali . It was an ideal mentor – mentee relationship!
As the classes started on a Monday, I remember I had to get up early, prepare myself to get ready, eat breakfast and reach the school gate on time. A new routine! Mother used to prepare a small lunch, and I used to take it with me in a “tiffin carrier”, as was its popular name back in those years. From free homeschooling to a very scheduled school day was my first impression on how a long formal education would be waiting for me! There was a gatekeeper at the school entrance, and he would greet each schoolboy at the gate. He used to sharpen our pencils with a small knife. He was very fast in this job as we used to have a big line behind him to resharpen our dull pencils. During the recess period around lunch hour, he used to be really alerted at the gate so that no boy could sneak out of the gate and cross the street. That was a true gatekeeping duty.
The school building was quite big with four floors and a large rectangular open yard in the middle. The yard was used for sports activities, and for any large-scale gathering of the students and their teachers. Our grade 3 class was in a small room at a corner of the yard. On the same floor there were a couple of rooms, one for the gatekeeper and the other one was for a teacher. Both lived on campus.
Our classroom was good enough to accommodate roughly twenty boys. By the way, it was not a co-ed school; the girls had a separate school nearby. In our classroom, we used to share long wooden benches with attached desks, and the teacher had his own separate table and chair right in front of us.
Our class teacher was a middle-aged man in his fifties, and he had long grayish hair covering the ears and the forehead. In the very first week, he drew on the blackboard a square quadrant, just like a monthly calendar page. Then he wrote the days of the week, Monday to Friday, at the top of the horizontal rows and the hours of the day (9am – 10am, 10am -11am, 11am – lunch break, etc.) on the left end of the vertical columns. Then he wrote in each square box the subject to be taught, like English, Bengali, Arithmetic, General Knowledge, and so on. I was very confused. Yes, I remember even today that it took me quite a few days to understand the table. At home mom taught me all these things without such a complicated diagram! Again, I reflected on what a formal education would be awaiting me!
Unlike today, in those days back in 1947 we didn’t have “Workbooks”; only the textbooks, an exercise book with ruled lines and a sharp pencil to write with, were good enough for early education. In the first week, the teacher handed over to us a small list of a few textbooks, mainly for Arithmetic, English, Bengali, as well as for History and Geography as a part of general knowledge. I handed over the little list to my dad. Next week when dad bought the few books and brought them home, I was surprised. He handed over the packet to me, and said softly with his usual smile, “Open the packet carefully!”. I opened the packet very carefully, as he said, without tearing it apart, and there flashed out the beautifully colored cover page of each book. The living aroma of a brand-new book! I smelled each book repeatedly. This was quite a new experience! In mom’s homeschooling there was no such fresh smell of a new book. I only knew the crude odor of the daily newspaper delivered at our door each early morning by the mailman.
Besides my mother, another person in our home who made a profound impact in my early childhood, and later in my education up until the university years, was my paternal grandmother. She lived with us, or in other words, we lived in her house! We, all her grandchildren, used to call her Ma , meaning mother in many Indo-Persian languages including our native tongue, Bengali. She was the ‘beloved mother’ for all her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren! Just one word Ma closed all the generation gaps.
As far as my earliest memory goes, maybe when I was 3 or 4 years old, I used to hang around a lot with my grandma. She would take me with her whenever she would go out to see her brothers and sisters and especially her nieces. Traveling with her stopped as soon as my primary school started! This was another impact that I still remember, apart from leaving my mother’s homeschooling, in the earliest part of my formal education. Even today my grandma comes quite often in my dreams.
Ma took care of my school fees. It was only 7 Indian Rupees (INR) per month in those years till I finished Grade 10 in the same Mitra Institut