Today, I had the opportunity to co-teach at a church-run tuition centre for underpriveleged children. It has been a long time since I experienced the teacher-student dynamics of a classroom. Eleven years ago, I was teaching five classes of forty to forty-five teenagers per classroom. There were lesson plans, record books, worksheets and whiteboard dust floating everywhere in the midst of the noise, the adrenaline and the heat of the typical Malaysian public school classroom. Perhaps it was my youthful idealism of wanting to “change the world” , or the intensity of my upbringing that gave me a sense of mission- for I found that those hours with my students inspired , drained, refreshed and challenged me to a measure matched only by the task of parenting that I would encounter later after I’d walked along the corridors of public school for the last time as a secondary schoolteacher.
Today, my pupil was a 6 year old girl who could write A-Z (both capital letters and regular letters), spell ‘yes’ and ‘no’. She was the only one under my ‘care’ today. We spent the two hours learning how to read “I like “, “I don’t like” and “I can” by drawing, talking ( me asking and she, answering) and playing short games like “pin this tag on things you don’t like , like smelly shoes and rubbish). When “class” was over, she skipped merrily off to the playground and pounced on the swings together with her sisters and friends.
I can’t quite understand it, but I so enjoyed the experience of being with the children, even though I taught only one of them today. Intan’s enthusiasm was infectious : ” I can jump “, “I can skip”, I don’t like kasut busuk” . How I loved it when she could read the those simple words!
When I reached home and my two rapscallion dears grinned at me- my heart was full with gratitude: thank You for Easter!
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