Book: Teacher by catloving

Judge: KainAlexander

For: Mystic Awards 2018

The title is fairly self-explanatory and suits the direct nature of the narrative. I loved the composition of the cover, but found the watermark in the dead center a tad distracting from the rest of the image. The synopsis appears to be a direct quote from within the text itself, and seems lengthy compared to the length of the piece itself. I think it could be improved by eliding the section after the quote from the father, as that serves as a great hook by itself. 

This short story was paced like a swift retrospective over the stages of the author's life as she came to accept her love of the written word. The opening line grabs the attention nicely, setting the contrast between the shining (and in some cases notorious) expectations of millenials with the supposed 'average' quality of the narrator. The flow of the story is, due to its retrospective and introspective nature, quite stream-of-consciousness. This resulted in many jumps back and forth in time. The style works well for this sort of story, and helps to mitigate some of the technical errors I encountered in reading it. 

This short story, as stated before, reads as a narrative essay about life and study in India. I feel as if this was an autobiographical piece, which explains the use of many abbreviations for courses throughout. (An expansion on what those abbreviations stand for would help readers have even more clarity!) My comments on the work itself speak more to the relatability of the piece, but I will restate my main points here: Much of what is said in this story serves as a sad social commentary on the way the Arts, and especially Arts Education are treated in a Westernized world. Even in the US, I've encountered this mentality that Arts and Humanities are for those not intelligent enough to handle careers in the Sciences, which is simply not the case! Has this been addressed before? Yes. But that doesn't make it any less true.

Here is, sadly, where I find myself forced to dock some points. I really enjoyed the overall concept and pacing of this narrative essay (as that's more what it reads as), but found my enjoyment held back by many grammatical errors. Some of the syntax employed suggested that English was a second language for the author, which is understandable, given the subject matter in question. Therefore, I don't feel right taking too many points away from this category, but I will point out a few places where improvement would be most merited. 

 One, the shifting of tense from past to present occurred many times while I was reading. One very noticeable instance was when the narrator commented to the audience that "Life is never that easy, is it?" This would be fine on its own, but after the past tense had been thoroughly established by all the prose beforehand, it came across as jarring. 

 Two, while some sentence fragments and run-on constructions are to be expected in stream-of-consciousness style narratives, there were enough in this case to prove distracting. There were moments where one thought would be split into two sentences and vice versa. A quick editing/proofreading pass with help from a native speaker would probable help.

The only character we saw that received any real development was the narrator herself over the course of her academic life, going from lacking in confidence to sure of herself and her decisions. As she was the POV character, this makes sense. However, it comes at the cost of portraying any of the other figures in her life, like her parents or her other teachers, as one-dimensional. It's hard for me to suggest an improvement on this as trying to give more dimension or context to these other figures would prove distracting to the overall theme being portrayed. 

As stated in my comments on the story itself, I find this short story to be a very strong piece of social commentary on Arts/Humanities and Education in the role of an increasingly Science and Technology focused world, especially when placed against the backdrop of Indian sociocultural norms. I feel like the best way to improve the overall flow and feel of the narrative would be to find a native English speaker to look over the story and offer some grammar and syntax corrections. As strong as the central theme of this book is, I feel with a small coat of polish, it would shine like the diamond in the rough it is!