In Memory of Raju

One story I would like to tell is about our school in Kombur village. It had 5 standards, with both girls and boys going to the same school. But it had only 1 teacher, who would go to each class in turn and teach different materials based on each standard. Each class had no more than 5-6 students, making a total of 25 students in the entire school. The teacher, one Santhanam, would teach every subject to every student. He was, in fact, native to Kombur and distantly related to our family. His style of teaching was to shout the lesson as loud as possible, so entire school could hear everything from every class. He was very proud of his teaching style, and he would ask all students if his teaching was not so much better than any of the city school teachers. All kids would happily agree with him that he was the best teacher – but most of them had no experience with any other teacher or school at all.