Probably I wasn’t a good enough teacher!
I am relating an incident while I was a Soft Skills Trainer at Arena Animation Academy, Barasat. My job was to encourage the students to improve their spoken English skills and teach them some Personality Development tips and tricks. Because there was no examination for these classes and it was just a value addition class, maximum students used to bunk my classes. Whenever I caught the ones who used to absent – they had some clichéd excuse for not attending the classes!
I might have lost my job for poor attendance…but thankGODfully B.SC in Multimedia was introduced which had English and Hindi as mandatory subjects and the students had to even appear for exams too…thus my part time job as a faculty got saved!
So 5th September came and I had seen my sister (she is a teacher by profession) getting loads of gifts – mostly pens and cards – but that does not matter – what matters is the thought behind the gift…..when a student packs a gift for his/her teacher – it shows their fondness for their teacher – a kind of joy that they could present a card or a pen to their teacher. So I also went expecting couple of gifts from my students. None came!
Well, it was not that students were not aware of this gifting fashion on Teacher’s Day – because my other colleagues had bags full of gifts! In the evening when all the colleagues met at the staff room, they kept their gift packets on one side and we were all having tea when one of the colleagues started opening his gifts…..and then others too started….and I had none to show…that was pretty much embarrassing you see!!!….and then you know how colleagues pull each other’s legs….one of them even asked me to show my gifts…..and when I said no one gave me any gift….my wicked friends had a hearty laugh…and added – ‘They don’t love you enough…..it is not so easy to earn love and respect’!!
(deep sigh) – well I had nothing to say to their sarcastic comments….they were just taking revenge…since I myself never left any opportunity to give ample sarcastic dose to my friends and colleagues!
PS: I think one girl gave me a Teacher’s Day card….and that was pretty much precious for me – I had kept it in my collection box for a very long time!
