Learning with the Mother

RECITATIONS AND POEMS

For the dictation and recitation classes, the Mother gave the children short passages to write or recite. Most were passages from her own writings but sometimes She also wrote from memory sayings from other saints, She knew so many beautiful quotations of famous people by heart. The Mother would write these short passages in my notebook for dictation as well as recitation. Sometimes she would write just one quotation at a time and sometimes she would write many quotations and use only one or two out of these. Passages for recitation and dictation were not written separately. At the end of each class she would select the passage for the following week, whether it was for dictation or for recitation.

I would then type out the selected quotation neatly and put it up on a notice board at the department of physical education. The children would come and copy it down in their notebooks for memorising or would learn the spellings for dictation. I would ask the younger ones to come during the school recess and make them repeat and memorise the quotations.

When a child recited without mistake, the Mother noted it down in a little chit pad. When he got ten recitation points, he was awarded a special prize by the Mother. These prizes were from the little things that the Mother gave me to keep in my almirah so that She could distribute as required. These prizes were pencils, erasers, photographs, picture postcards, little toys etc.

During the recitation classes, the children would be seated in a big semicircle around the Mother. One child at a time would come to the centre, sit in front of Her and recite a selected passage.

Tara is teaching the children to learn the phrases by heart during the school recess

On one such occasion, Tarini sat in front of the Mother and forgot her lines. She kept sitting while trying to remember. In those few minutes the Mother sketched her portrait in my notebook.

Tarini—A sketch by the Mother

In the early years, each child came and recited individually in front of the Mother, later when the quotations or poems became longer and the number of children increased, the Mother started calling two children together to recite.

The first section here consists of these recitation lessons by the Mother. They are not complete because we could not trace all the recitations. But I have included as many as I could find in my notebooks and those of other children and Mrityunjaya Da’s diary. Since there is no proper date wise record of all the recitations and the dates on which the Mother wrote in my notebook are different from the actual recitation dates, we decided to reproduce here all the quotations of this section without the dates. We are also not sure if all of them were actually used for the recitation classes.