Learning English
A Grateful Heart, Day 25
Many of the students in the college I teach in, at present, are first-generation learners. Most of them go to work: several of them pay their fees with the money they earn. Not one of these brave, wonderful people is ashamed or embarrassed by the fact that they don’t have a rich parent to fund their education.
I teach them communication skills, ethics, and public relations, and other soft skills.
But what they want more than anything else, from me, is not dry academics, but an assurance that working hard and being positive will be able to change their lives. Most of the kids have a problem with English. But they try so hard to improve themselves, to learn their first complete speech or paragraph in English, in their attempt to make me happy, it brings tears to my eyes, sometimes…there is so much of love and hope in what they are trying to do.
There is this boy in class who writes wonderful stories and scripts. Today he took out two books from his backpack, very shyly and very diffidently, and showed them to me. One was Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ and the other was on some other topic. “I am also beginning to read ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird,’” he informs me hesitantly. I am struck dumb both by the book he had chosen and the determination with which he has decided to educate himself.
And then, a girl who had volunteered to review a book, (John Green’s ‘The Fault in Our Stars’) speaks about the book and she tells me that what she takes away from the book is the hope and the light and the message that you don’t have to die before you actually do, and she says that all these messages remind her of what I teach in class.
It was such a completely unexpected observation, and it brought a lump to my throat. I couldn’t get over it.
When I left College today, I was walking on air. How many people and how many professions allow one to touch, with benediction, so many lives? I don’t think there is a single one. And when a class of teenaged students decides, collectively, that they would rather attend your lecture than do any of the other interesting things teenagers usually do, you can’t help but feel blessed.
I have survived twenty-five days of a month-long Gratitude Challenge, writing a story of gratitude, every day, for 25 days, in response to a prompt given by Ravyne Hawke, for her publication, ‘Promptly Written.’ I am grateful to Ravyne, as well as all my people, like Suja Sukumar, and Sujona Chatterjee, who have tirelessly cheered me on, to reach this milestone. Thank you!
