A tale of three teachers

In my previous posts, I shared some happy and funny memories from my childhood but today I wanted to write about some memorable, but not-so-happy experiences. As I've mentioned in my post about not speaking English, when I first went to school in the US, I accidentally went into the wrong classroom on the second day. It was the second grade room, led by a young teacher. I was placed in her class for second grade. Three things happened to me while I was in her classroom, which I will probably never forget. One day, I pushed my chair backwards to get up, not noticing that she was walking behind me and she got very angry. She shouted, 'this is the second time you've tried to MURDER me today!' Can you imagine how I felt as a seven-year-old who was very shy and had ever been scolded in such a terrible way before?

Another time I had to retake a spelling quiz, and the word she dictated was 'enjoy.' I had gotten this word wrong the first time and as she looked over my shoulder, I hesitantly started to put down the letters I N J ... but I heard her snickering and knew that I was wrong. I quickly erased the letters and spelled the word correctly the second time.

The third incident happened when I was sick with a cold and had some phlegm that I needed to cough up and get rid of. As I was leaning over the wastebasket, she came up to me and said, 'you're not supposed to be chewing gum!! It is against the rules.' I told her that I wasn't, and she kept asking me, 'so what were you spitting out?' Since my English still wasn't that great after a year of ESL lessons, I didn't know how to say 'phlegm' and I couldn't explain it properly. I felt very embarrassed and didn't know what to say. I wasn't the only one who suffered from her bad temper and inappropriate classroom management. Several of the parents at my school, including my mother, decided to report her to the board and she was forced to transfer to another school. I felt bad for the students there. I hope that she later learned how to treat her students with understanding rather than accusing them of misbehaving before getting the full picture.

When I got back to Taiwan at the age of 12, I was very behind on my Chinese although I had attended a weekend Chinese school in the United States. Luckily, my parents were able to send me to a school with a bilingual department where we had most of our lessons in English. However, we still had to take Chinese classes, and the Chinese teacher asked us to write something, but she did not assign a topic. I was so excited about this and decided to make up an elaborate story about living in the clouds. I don't remember much about the details of the plot, but it was an adventure story full of action and filled with different descriptions of what it felt like to be floating in the clouds. I thought it was very imaginative. Unfortunately the teacher refused to mark the work and said that I had to rewrite it completely because she did not understand the story. I was very upset and frustrated because I had worked so hard on it. I forgot what I ended up resubmitting but it definitely wasn't imaginative and I think it was quite boring.

A similar thing happened in high school where the Chinese teacher didn't like my work because it did not include many quotes or Proverbs. Therefore, I decided to submit an essay full of 'Confucius said this ... and Mencius said that ... And according to the sages, we should be doing this and that.' It was full of clichés and moralizing but she loved the work so much that she gave it one of the highest marks out of the entire class. I felt like my creative writing and imaginative work was not appreciated in the traditional Taiwanese education system where there was a very strict formula for writing essays. After I learned what the teachers wanted, I could follow this format, but was very uninterested in writing Chinese after that.

Now that I am an educator myself, I know it is not always easy to be a nice, inspirational teacher. However, I always try to encourage my students and try to understand their point of view. I am still very fortunate to have had mostly good teachers growing up. I thank them for helping me to get to where I am today.

This photo of a tree kangaroo at Ballarat wildlife park always cheers me up. I took it using my Canon 7D with 75-300 mm f4-5.6 lens.