Great teachers great minds
I have an increasing admiration for the teacher in high school who had all her students’ attention during her lesson. Full attendance when she called for one.
Lying on the bare earth, with arms opened wide, I remember looking like a lunatic but it didn’t matter. I opened my eyes with the sun shimmering, scratched my head, done my business and went home. Life in high school was confusing. The teachers, they were not quite sure what I was doing there, or whether they were teaching me the right things.
This amuses me.
A teacher asked me once, “What were you thinking? Were you even thinking?”
No. I wasn’t thinking, I didn’t think I ought to be thinking either; I just want to get away from you.
I must explain I was a frequent visitor to the principle’s office. Mostly because of the things I had done, or left undone. She mentioned once, “You’d think back at this one day and laugh, but for now this is wrong,” and sent me to detention class. Whenever I find myself in her office, I would sink my head, clasp my hands on my lap and start counting the minutes.
The principle would look at me through her thick glasses, “Do you think what you’ve done is wrong?” and I would sink further inside and stare down the royal blue carpet. Somehow I feel the furniture and wall color doesn’t match that well.
Clearly there was something missing in me. This must be so, since whether I had lost the library book, or failed to remember sin and cosine rules, or been late for school, or often forgetting Newton’s laws, the teachers all gave me an adult answer, “Please start thinking.”
They were always asking me to think.
As I saw the case, I lost the library book because I kept it in the school locker which was later found stolen; I could not remember sin and cosine rules because the pakcik selling eggs at the market won’t understand what I say; I was late for school because I prefered to zonk awhile longer on bed than to listen to tormented people giving speeches at 7.30 in the morning; and I keep forgetting Newton’s laws because I never bothered to learn them.
Were my teachers, perhaps, such intellects with great thoughts that they could not comprehend my profound immorality and corruption?
Well, maybe I stand to lose a great deal because I wasn’t a good student. Now you are expecting me to describe how I saw the foolishness of my ways and came back to acknowledge what disasters I have made of myself.
But you are wrong because I have grown to find delight in confronting these issues with the slightest regret. I have come and I have known, mingling with the great, and yet helpless people you left behind because they were stereotyped. True, there is a kind of innocence in prejudices but I view such thinking with an intolerant contempt and an incautious mockery. People whom you lag behind and find their deficiencies bolster your ego but it does not earn my respect.
I have dealt at length with my teachers. Through them I discovered that thought is often full of unconscious prejudice, ignorance and hypocrisy. Often I lowered my views and just be a good humored comical being, well liked either as a petty officer, a waitress at the bar or just another clerk in the office. This way sometimes I am able to find my native dignity even when I feel absolute dispositions against what they think.
Though more properly put, it is what they feel, rather than what they think. It is a feeling, rather than a thought.
Having such withdrawals, I realized that the world we live in is a world where prejudices are so often called loyalties; and more distinctively; a world where we are content to say we think when all we do is feel.
Thank you teachers, for you have seriously taught me something out of syllabus!
posted by 毓涵 @ 8:47 AM
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