Nostalgia and Teachers' Day

Through the long gone years, I have much grown… From a young schoolboy to a present day aging crone… But in my mind, I am as I have always been… All through the years and after all that I have seen.. Now that I am trying to frame some nice phrases with a theme.. It refreshes fading memories and some forgotten dreams… It intrigues me and it is refreshing to acknowledge Teachers’ Day… For their care and guidance in molding all students’ ways… I am who I am today at this juncture of time and my life… As every other man or woman if they choose to reflect on individual lives.... I remember still the draconian Arithmatics teacher… Her angry screams and tongue lashings came in large numbers… I still recall certain friends whose faces and names I have long forgotten… Their miseries and sufferings when in came this lady teacher for numbers… Vividly I remember her insufferable fury at one boy, a chronic underperformer.. We felt his inadequacies, mixing b’s and d’s as typical of a learning disorder… Back then, who was to know there exist victims to this thing called dyxlesia.. Back then, to spare the rod was something alien in any classroom in Malaysia… On a happier note there was once another teacher unlike any other… Sad to say, her name I have long forgotten, yet somehow I still remember… How much I believed it when she regularly remarked in my term report card.. Talkative in class but can still improve was her comment that she penned in my card…. I dimly remember still how my big sister, bless her soul, used to to have a huge laugh… Each time she had to explain to my uneducated parents about my performance in class… There was also this tall scrawny Indian teacher, dressed daily in long white pants… A long slim 3 foot rattan cane ever readily concealed in those long white pants… As discipline master, he religiously tolerated no nonsense from students in all matters… And when he in class for his Arithmatics lessons, all students shuddered yet remembered… I remembered distinctly the sting when out flashed his cane and thundered down our palms… For each schoolboy wrong, many a classmate quivered in terror once he started to rant… Many other teachers too , long forgotten, labored and struggled over all those junior years … As little school boys and girls, we gradually progressed into our teens over those same years.. To be continued ...part 2