7 - Teachers of the Lyceum

During the later high school years, as we were growing up into unruly and rebellious, moody and awkward teenagers, with sexual urges, irritability, unwarranted anger, the stubbornness of a mule, that is the set of behavioural characteristics hormonal changes of adolescence bring about, the actors of our teachers' troupe changed accordingly to match the demand of maintaining discipline. Our Greek literature and language courses were assigned to an uncompromising and strict deputy headmaster, Mr Tektonidis, a gray-haired man of Pontian descent as his surname attested, who presented himself in an always sullen demeanour, but he liked to begin his lessons with caustic jokes about current political and sports affairs in a stand-up comedy style. He never cracked the slightest of smiles with his deadpan humour, but his jokes caused widespread laughter soothing our low morning spirits before his final pause brought dead silence in the classroom. With a poker face, like that of many successful comedians of the stage, and abrupt increases in the intensity of his voice from the often unpredictably angry reactions to any straying of the class to murmurs and unruliness, he had sown respect, along with a dose of fear, even to the naughtiest amongst us.

Mr Tektonides became associated with one of the most embarrassing episodes of my high school years; an incident that effected strong feelings of embarrassment and shame, along with fear. It was after the end of a dull winter school day when the classrooms were emptying from its schoolboys when I wrote one or two abusive phrases with a marker on the green top of my desk, aimed at (whom else?) classmate Eliopoulos. I cannot pinpoint to the exact reason, but there must have been valid ones that would justify those insults directed at Eliopoulos, at times when I was becoming the target of some intolerable bullying of derogatory and offensive nature, by him and his cronies, either in in the classroom or during the morning assemblies in the presence of others, which I could not deflect, or breaks in the courtyard, from which I could sometimes stir clear. Next morning before the start of the Greek Language class, Mr. Tektonides stood at the podium with a terrifying scowl in his cloudy face and unusually angry look (clearly, not his custom prelude of opening his lesson with a joke or two) in front of a class in dead silence and frozen by anticipation. In his hand he was holding a piece of paper, but without reading from it, he spelled out the profanities I had written on the desk top. The cleaner alerted him in the evening before his departure, before she wiped the them off. ‘I want to know who wrote these obscenities,’ he asked to the frozen class. He demanded that the culprit (which was me) stood up and boldly admitted in front of everyone his misdeed – ‘if he were a man and had the balls’. If not, as he claimed he had well-founded suspicions of who the offender was it, he would follow it up with a discussion in private at the headmaster’s office with immeasurably severe consequences. I could feel my heart beating strongly and rapidly and hands shaking. I was sitting frozen in my seat like the rest of the class, and sensing my face blushing and likely betraying my guilt. The couple of minutes in an uninterrupted silence Mr. Tektonides waited for the perpetrator to come forward and confess his grievous mistake felt like an eternity. During those minutes, I nearly reached the verge of exceeding a generally low courage threshold, showing some decency, what in Greece is called φιλότιμο, and honourably admitting my guilt. My mind, however, weighed also various other possible outcomes from that episode and the consequences of either admitting guilt or cowering. Would an almost certain punishment be mitigated, if I manly confessed in front of the class? Was Mr. Tektonides bluffing as to the suspicions he had? Could it be that, because of my previous decent behaviour and excellent grades, I was above suspicion? Why did he cast wild glances at me every now and then? He clearly knew that it was me and Eliopoulos shared that desk on which these words were written! How severe would that punishment be anyway? To what extent would my parents be involved? In what turmoil would that cause and what a fool would that make of myself! Surely a reputation as an excellent student throughout the four years of school should be irreparably and irreversibly spoilt, an indelible in my school career... What would the repercussions be at home? At the end of those torturous two minutes wait, I realised that I simply could not summon enough courage and, truth to be told, there was not much in stock of the courage and bravery in my boyish soul for me to unearth.

Mr. Tektonides reiterated the grave consequences in store for the culprit. Obscenities in full view of the cleaners and the personnel on a piece of public property was bringing the school into disrepute, and he concluded by saying that ‘he who did it will certainly be found out and punished in an exemplary manner’, continued sullenly with his typically dry and uninspiring lecture of modern Greek grammar and syntax. The episode was eventually forgotten, at least by the majority of an indifferent to such events class of teenagers, however, it continued to weigh heavy on me for a while after. The shadow of Mr. Tektonides possibly knowing that it was me who wrote the obscenities on the desk lingered throughout the school year. It was getting darker during his classes and whenever he casted a glanced towards me, but all the while that heavy feeling was somehow counterweighted by the relief that I escaped something far worse: an expulsion, a vilification in front of the school, repercussions at home, and even derailment of my course to university admission. This moral burden I was carrying throughout the year was lightened by the circulating rumours that Mr. Tektonides, he illicitly tutored at home students of my own and other schools in preparation for their university exams.

In our last grade of the Lyceum, Mr. Tektonides, to the relief of many, myself first and foremost, was replaced by another philologist, Mrs. Barachanou, a mature woman with a petite figure and pretty face, and mild manners. One would have thought of her as an easy prey for the troublemakers of the class, but rather surprisingly and against the apparent odds she managed to maintain order and discipline, barring an inevitable innocuous murmuring from the back rows -understandable, during the hours of tiredness, boredom and listlessness. In fact, Mrs. Barachanou proved more capable than her predecessors in enticing a group broader than just the crème de la crème of the class into actively participating in discussion on the core subjects of Greek language and literature she was teaching. Perhaps, due to several years of experience teaching grown up boys and because of having raised boys herself in her family· perhaps because of an intellectual cultivation she exuded, a lack of which other teachers replaced by resorting to yelling and punishments in instance of unruliness and disobedience; or, perhaps, because of her headteacher husband, also an experienced philologist in from a well-known family in the city; or, most likely, because after her long career in an environments of boisterous and inconsiderate and even brutal adolescents, became uncompromising and made certain from the onset that she would not play games in her class. After all, a crucial junction, the period of nationwide university entry exams, was approaching and those who wished a few carefree years of love and excitement after school (and those represented most of the class) had their heads down in their studies. The penny had dropped for many, so to speak.

From the beginning of that last year, as I was becoming more politicized, I understood that Mrs. Barachanou and I shared a few common progressive views. I also sensed she appreciated my personality, as that of a diligent student with a well-rounded culture, from novels and philosophical essays I was ardently reading from Father’s library, beside the focus into maths and physics. Throughout the year I produced well-written composition ingrained with literary elements I was borrowing from the literary styles of the novel authors and poets I read. And yet, towards the end of the year I managed to disappoint her in a major way; I might have even upset her to the point altering the high opinion she had of me.

In one final assignment, I undertook the project to analyse the work of one of the writers whose most extra-curriculum novels I was reading at home in my spare time: the work of a leftist and, therefore, non-mainstream writer, Dimitris Hatzis. I devoted time and effort to compile my critique of his work; I wrote and edited and proofread and rewrote neatly several pages of text. I would have to present my work, the quality of which I felt proud of, would have to present of a work of quality in front of the class, whom only idea of modern literature was through extracts from outdated and ossified works of Greek literature included in the textbooks the ministry handed at the beginning of each year. Therefore, an anti-establishment writer like Dimitris Hatzis and his works were virtually unknown. I sat in the morning behind the teacher’s desk on the dais in front of the blackboard, and with my head bowed I began to mechanically read my essay to the class. All started seemingly well and in a relative silence, whilst Mrs. Barachanou standing at the very back of the room against the wall was listening attentively. But my presentation was too long; far too long for the concentration span of even the few interested students; the whispering and murmuring gradually intensified, as a restless class began to lose any interest to whatever was said and barely made any sense to her. All the while, Eliopoulos, from the first row-desk we share just under and at arm’s length from the teacher’s dais where I was sitting, started distracting me with joking comments and gestures, with teasing and grimaces exaggerating his underbite. But it was mostly as the result of nerves from the noise emanating from the depths of the classroom, rather than Eliopoulos' play, I began to smile during my delivery and at some point, half-way through my presentation, I could barely manage to contain my laughter by drowning it into chuckles. I decided to skip several paragraphs to speed up my presentation and take it arduously over the finish-line. It was becoming clear that nobody was paying attention. A well-prepared presentation was turning into a fiasco amidst a persistent buzz.

 Ms. Barachanou, from the back of the room where she was standing, as soon as I finished my reading walked towards the dais visibly irritated and reprimanded me in uncharacteristically fierce tones: for the general lack of respect and self-respect and dignity during my presentation. In essence, I was ridiculed in front of a class, suddenly turned quiet to listen to my chastening by the teacher. Towards the end of the school year, she would express her disappointment to Father on one of his now scarce visits to the school, although she mildly praised my writing skills. At least, in the last weeks of school, I somehow redeemed myself after that mishap, when she selected one my compositions for reading in front of the class. My essay of several pages on the work of Dimitris Hatzis, compiled with diligence and devotion, was dumped in a trunk under the sofa-bed I was sleeping and was eventually discarded and ended along with other notes from school in the dustbin. The incident of that hapless presentation in front of the unreceptive audience injured further a fragile self-confidence: the wound took several years to heal and any recollection of that incident filled me with those discomforting feelings of embarrassment and shame, until another more portentously embarrassing incident took its place in my soul. With self-confidence and self-assurance checked, due to some genetic origins compounded by nurturing and life experiences like the above, I was often seized by disproportionate and unjustified by the circumstances, nervousness that could lead to panic, however ultimately manageable, every time I had to confront and speak in front of a group of people.

For his part, Mr. Notarides, our portly mathematician in the Lyceum years, commanded discipline merely by virtue of his bulky figure, covered in the winter days by a solemn long black coat, and a proportionally to his stoutness deep voice. His large round face rarely displayed a timid crooked smile, which normally followed his dry explanation of a mathematical equation on the board. He seemed, nevertheless, to be a kind-hearted man, which I found typical of stout people, although he lacked in polished manners. Like the public-school teachers was uninspiring and unmotivated and his teaching skills were mediocre. But he appreciated my mathematical intelligence and knowledge above a poor class average, especially after some success I had, awarded by a prize, in a national mathematical competition, and, thus, he often relied on me for support, when mathematical questions and problems he posed to the class hit on an impenetrable wall of silence by a reluctant or unmotivated or ignorant class. I had never been an active participant in class discussions either remained so throughout of my education, because of an extremely reserved character, and because I wanted to avoid the crown of a ‘nerd’ or a ‘brown-noser’ the class pleb easily bestowed to students that associate themselves with teachers in school. Nevertheless, Mr. Notarides, especially in our last year of school when Maths reached an incomprehensible level for many, developed the habit of addressing me directly with his questions having given up for a response from the rest of the class, in the certainty that I knew most of the answers and to avoid the embarrassing gaps in the flow of his teaching. Besides, sitting in the first row of the desks closest to the podium, I was an easy target, a ‘lame duck’ so to speak.

The only time Mr. Notarides' lost his composure and saw him agitated and angry happened when the white noise from the constant omni-present whispering and chatting during most classes was spiked by the unmistaken sound of a loud fart emanated from the back rows, at a moment when Mr Notarides, with his back turned to the class, was writing on the blackboard the proof of a theorem. The fart was inevitably followed by a widespread laughter from the plenum. Mr. Notarides abandoned his proof, threw his chalk violently against the board, and headed menacingly towards the back rows to the source of the fart, with his heavy slow stride. As there he could have no inkling of who the culprit might have been (there were a few candidates for such an act, but I had my own strong clues), and it was unthinkable of a snitch to come forward, he stopped half way the aisle and after surveying the tops of bowed heads at the back of the room, he said in a raised deep voice: ‘I accept that you chat to each other during the lessons, I even tolerate the occasional giggle. But farting in the classroom cowardly behind my back is bang out of order!’ Some giggles were suppressed into quiet chuckles from us, the innocent ones of the front rows, stern faces were set at the back. Thankfully, the bell for the school break rang shortly after and Mr. Notarides’ proof of the theorem was left hanging on the board, ridiculed by the fart.

The classes on religious education, that is, of the Christian Orthodox dogma, amounted to nothing more than a repetitive and non-sensical indoctrination that effected to most (barring a handful of devout Christians) something between an unutterable boredom to a sheer indifference. Unfortunately, the recitation and the pointless analysis of passages with circular arguments from the Old and New Testament tormented us until the very last month of the Lyceum, even though the most enlightened amongst us, from different starting points, rejected the existence of the specific god the lessons propagandized and, for that matter, banished any god and religion from their lives. Chats with a self-perceived ‘anarchist’, but otherwise brilliant and diligent classmate Fotis Z, son of a poor and uneducated greengrocer, who was sitting behind me and Eliopoulos, next to Nikos Z, a close friend from primary school, were expanding into and covering the philosophical domains of Camus and Marx. Such discussions added some substance in the intellectual vacuum our classes in religious affairs presented, although it must be said the latter raised a series of existential and social questions, that is, ample material for philosophical discourse.  

The dynastic Mr. Athanasiades of our Gymnasium years was succeeded by a milder in manners, and of less dogmatic character and moderate political beliefs, Mr. Parparas, a bald little man with a pair of round glasses portraying the face of a studious scholar from a bygone era. Mr. Parparas turned out to be a neighbour in the Harilaou district we moved to just, before the last year of secondary school and in the university years that followed, and I often bumped on him in the street or the basement of his apartment building, dusting, washing and polishing his modest, yet precious Hyundai. The relationship between priests and theologians with material goods, such as cars and property, often a more intimate one than of ‘secular’ types, I had found then difficult to comprehend and not to consider it hypocritical. Yet again, those people who adhered to spiritualism belonged to the very same materialistic world. For many amongst them teaching ‘theology’ or preaching God’s testament was merely means to secure a livelihood and enjoy the conveniences and temptations offered by the advances of our capitalist society. And, therefore, they had to be treated with the respect any layman and commoner deserves, despite negative presumptions about the parasitic role of their occupation in Greek society, as stemmed from Marxist and the like prejudices.

Mr. Parparas, our neighbour, warmly congratulated me at a corner of our streets when I was admitted to the university and, in many occasions thereafter, asked with genuine interest about my studies. But the most notable memory I retained from the years of teaching us theology, was the lowest grade I was ever awarded in school exams: a 6 out of 20. The final year grade in ‘Religious Education’ was barely better: 13/20, a large deviation from the standards of excellence my family was used to. It did not mean anything to Father, the atheist and perennial mocker of priests and theologians, and he laughed at it. Mother, however, who also maintained good neighbourly relations with Mr. Parparas was clearly disturbed. For me, a low final grade in those insufferable religious studies was perhaps a badge of honour, a minute symbol of my rebellion against an oppressive educational establishment. Yet, Mr. Parparas was fair and rather lenient, in as much as it rated my overall association with our national religion was concerned.

As far as this stumble was concerned there were specific reasons. Indifference and negligence in marginal subjects carrying no weight for admission to university, like the tedious religious studies were subjected to, led me to lose track of the order of topics Mr. Parparas’ addressed in his course. In anticipation of the exam towards the end of the term, I facetiously studied the one or two preceding the latest one he covered and on the material of which we were tested. The questions did not make much sense to me and the anxiety of a potential disaster in the exams engulfed me. To respond to the theological questions, I summoned fragments of my scrappy knowledge on the subject, from six years of religious education, and improvised piecemeal and full of hot-air answers with whatever was coming to mind.  A theologian of Mr. Parpara's experience easily discerned such a foolish improvisation. He might have perceived it as a mockery of the divinity of the content of the course and, perhaps, his role as a teacher of this ‘divine’ subject.

The pantheon of the teachers who stood at the dais, at arm’s length from the first-row of desk where I was condemned to sit next to Eliopoulos, to lecture us, was appended with a few more characters of different gravities. There was the benevolent chemistry teacher, Mr. Eleftheriades, who won the class-wide sympathy and esteem and attention, with his smile, kind manners and soft voice he never raised. He never had to. When I bumped into him outside a café, a few months into my university days, he greeted me with my full name. In our brief exchange that ensued, I mistakenly addressed him as Mr. Athanasiades, the unpleasant theologian of the Gymnasium, instead of Mr. Eleftheriades. It was an error I rued for a while after I realised it. Then there was the neurotic and forgettable Kara... something, an insignificant and uncouth individual with a provincial accent and alien blond features, possibly of Vlack origins from the mountainous regions of the mainland. A trace of respect he might have received in his by and large irrelevant biology, zoology and geography classes he taught, evaporated, when rumours circulated that he was seen by a schoolmate watching porn films in one of the city's seedy cinemas. He was the only one who, after some giggles I could not suppress, triggered by some Eliopoulos’ and Zois’s jokes, he evicted me from the classroom.

At the very bottom of our teachers’ ladder, if there was any kind of grade scale for the teaching staff, there was a hapless, in many ways unfortunate, young teacher of psychology. He turned out to be a PhD candidate in one of city’s university departments and was appointed as a temporary teacher of an inconsequential as much as insubstantial one-hour-per week class in Psychology, which, to compound his misfortune, was scheduled for the last hour of Friday, when most everyone wanted to break free from the shackles of a tedious week at school. He taught a subject hardly anyone understood or had any desire to pay any attention to. He had curly hair on top of a nerdy gaunt angular face and wore small rounded glasses, but his the most noticeable by the school mob feature face was the acne pimples that covered much of his cheeks. Those pimples, according to Eliopoulos and the other alpha males and bullies of the school, who did not miss any opportunity for vitriolic comments on the matter, considered them an unmistaken sign of habitual masturbation. He spoke in undertones and in a soft and low voice barely audible at the back of the class, where the bulk of the troublemakers were sitting. Inevitably, from the first day he became an easy target from the ‘gallery’. When the wild beasts of school sense weakness, they charge and devour their prey.

In the classroom, in his presence, paper airplanes, pencils and other projectiles, including condoms, were thrown towards the dais and the blackboard. The class was raging with giggles, screams, exclamations, insults. Many went in and out of the class, without asking permission, supposedly to pee, most likely for a fag. To his mild rebuke in slightly raised tone of voice to temperamental Eliopoulos, the latter visibly offended by the reprimand, he got up from his seat next to me, violently pushed my chair aside, stood in front of the psychologist with his fists clenched and squared up to him shouting -for the rest of the room to hear: ‘Oi, watch it, man!’ The psychologist, clearly shocked and frightened, interrupted his lesson and left the room, threatening to report the incident to the principal: ‘I don’t give a fuck!’ was Eliopoulos' angry reply. The class laughed. It was entertained.

The acting principal at the time, Mr. Tektonides, did not intervene; neither to that one, nor any other of the numerous incidents, whereby school savages forced our psychologist to interrupt his lessons and sometimes in tears, to abandon the class in a chorus of jeers. The compassionate soul in me genuinely felt sorry for his predicament and generally I behaved during his classes with a relatively minimum deference, despite the deleterious presence of Eliopoulos next to me, despite my disinterestedness to psychology, despite the poor quality of the teaching and the awkwardness I felt during extreme incidents of bullying and disorder. He was looking down into my eyes for support during the martyrdoms he endured from a cruel class of teenagers. His tenure with our school, not surprisingly, was cut short -for whatever reason. His advanced studies in psychology and the research he was involved into outside our classes apparently offered no much help with his personality and dealing with adverse and distressful situations. A year later, as a student of the same university, I came across him in the library. He was sitting in a remote corner of the reading room, in front of a pile of books and papers, apparently taking notes for his dissertation. I greeted him. He tried to start a long conversation, seeking perhaps redemption from a dark past (who knows?), but I courteously kept it short. Later in my university years, I spotted him late at night, a lonely sad soul wandering along the promenade, talking and gesturing to himself. He was the most tragic figure of my Lyceum years, amongst teachers and students.

Our school years were approaching the end all of us were yearning for. Long after I was wondering -amongst others: What legacy my teachers left? What did I learn from them from six full years of our incessant secondary education? I reached the same conclusion as many of my friends and peers. It was not that much. Perhaps, I enriched my active vocabulary and managed to handle the cumbersome grammatic and syntactic intricacies of the Modern Greek language (to the extent that this was possible with an awkward and unstructured language), so much so that I could express myself orally or in writing, with skills above the national average. I acquired some useful knowledge of maths and physics, handy in life and for thinking rationally and to a lesser extent for my professional career. Most of that knowledge, however, was obtained on my own initiative, motivated primarily from family members rather than my school teachers. And its utility in life proved limited, despite endless hours locked in a room, studying for tests and exams, despite the dozens of thick books I read from cover-to-cover -books handed gratis at the beginning of each year before ending up at the stakes outside our school by the least dedicated graduates or, at best, buried dusted in a trunk or a store room at the end of school.

The systemic compulsion to follow a rigid timetable with the aim of covering an arbitrarily and irrationally organized ‘learning material’, to implant knowledge in young brains, barely equipped us for adult life and most was out of touch with reality, as well as anachronistic or unhistorical. It left its mark and had an arguably profound effect in our behaviour and psychology, our inner worlds and ultimately the personality we formed as we were growing into adulthood. In the first steps of life proper, adult life, in addition to quantitatively accumulating knowledge, one also needs inspiration to channel one’s creativity and talents, support and encouragement in discussing ideas, thoughts and concerns. The Greek public school system failed in many respects and very few, if any, of the teachers we came across provided substantial help to those ends. Besides, the core studies and the fundamentals required by the university entry exams were furnished in their entirety by private tutoring, at home or ad-hoc centres, which nearly everyone who aspired to further education attended. The brightest and most ambitious amongst the children of the middle class needed the exhausting school hours only as a stage mandated by state law, at the expense of other valuable parts of young lives. The joys I felt during the years of high were limited. My freedom was constrained, my liberties curtailed. Motivation towards attending school virtually non-existent. I do not remember many happy days thereof.