The fruit of your labour

If you are a doctor, you will know the fruit of your labour right away. If you give the correct medicine your patient is cured. If you give the wrong one, he dies. So simple.

What about a teacher? I can never claimed that it is due to me as a teacher that my students turned out well later in life. There are just too many factors in their life for any teachers to claimed that they have make a positive impact. Yet like the doctor, if a teacher took the wrong step often she has the ability to kill her students joy for learning.

A few weeks ago, my ex VP invite me and a couple of teachers for his daughter's wedding. Throughout the dinner, we managed to connect again. We decided to keep in touch through Facebook.

It was a joy to connect with the teachers but through their profile, I managed to connect with this crazy bunch of old boys that I taught eleven years ago.

I remembered them clearly because they broke many teachers heart. To say that they have behaviour problems was an understatement. There were many underlying factors that were influencing their life beyond what a classroom teachers could influence or control.

I remembered the Principal, Discipline Master, teachers and I spend a lot of time cracking our head over how to help them.

Sad to say at the end of the year, we felt we have failed as we have nothing to show for our effort.

It was so heartening to see that so many of them have turned out so well after so many years. Some have settled down and married. Others are still in the university as they are late developers. One who created the most troubled even top his cohort and earned an oversea scholarship.

A teacher can only do so much in class. Like a gardener, she can only ensure that the soil is fertile for the seed to grow. Sometime weeds will grow along with the seedings. She have try her best to weeds out these weeds but the growing has to be done by the seeds themselves.

I am so gald that these bunch of students from 3E6 has grown into gentlemen and scholars of who is passionate about life.

Thank you fro giving this old ess hope to continue her journey as a gardener. If she is luckily to harvest some more fruit, she will remember that she is not the one responsible for it but it was the seeds themselves.