my father’s experience

Whenever I had a chance to converse with my father I used to ask him about his life experiences and the ways he served his students and community besides his classroom teaching. My father shared with me a lot of his positive life experiences. I remember once my father told me that most of his students’ parents were working for daily wages or coolies and lived in poverty and even some of the students had no proper food and shelter to live in. They lived in roofed homes and tents where there were no electricity and basic facilities. So he helped lots of his students and their parents in many different ways. He also shared with me that he taught private classes free of cost to many poor and underprivileged students who were in need, he helped many parents get jobs and start a new small home-based business for their living. He helped many parents to do agriculture in an effective way to lead their lives. For that, my father asked for help from many of his schoolmates and friends who had been government officials in those days who might help the students’ parents to get employment opportunities and start a small home-based business as well. I remember I heard from my father that he got many free agricultural lands for many people in the community free of cost under free-government schemes for those who were suffering and had no source of income at all for their living. As he was a science teacher he also helped many people in the community to become self-reliant. He added that he always taught the community about self-reliance, taught how to live life independently without depending on others. He also told me that he trained the community with the chemical formula to make a washing-blue and candle-making method and helped them start their own business. He told me that he introduced lots of jobless people to his friends who were businessmen and officials to make them buy those home-made products like snacks, washing-blue, candles, handkerchiefs, etc., Moreover, as my father had been employed in a London Mission Christian School (later the name was changed to CSI Boys Higher Secondary School, Erode), he had lots of contacts with foreign Christian missionaries. So through those missionaries, he got lots of pen-pals for his students even for me as well. The important lesson that I learned from my father’s life experience was that a teacher not only can teach subjects to the students but also can help and enlighten their lives by rendering the service. The other lesson that I learned from my father was that a teacher can go the extra mile to render selfless service to the students and community. So all of my father’s experiences had been the motivating factors and inspiration for me and were the reasons to make a strong decision to become a great teacher in the future.