Monday 14 September 2015

A tribute to a teacher.

Hi there! (I'm going to pretend I forgot about the Oath of Friday Posts) Here's an article I wrote for a newspaper for Teacher's Day. Unfortunately, it never got posted but hey, never a bad idea to share it with a couple of friends is it? Behold, for I present to you this annoyingly-under-worded ('strictly stick to the word limit of 200,' said the ad. *sigh*) article about a teacher I felt truly blessed learning from: Ms Pranaya!

William Arthur Ward once said “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” Such great teachers are hard to come by, and call it serendipity perhaps, when I had the honour to learn from one great teacher, Ms. Pranaya. All of a sudden, English went from a 'good' subject of mine to an fascinating one. Magic, you say? No, it is the power of inspiration. 


To say I have learnt from her would be an understatement; rather, she gave me the capacity to learn. She taught me to be open-minded to all subjects, and take a trifle more effort to learn the world and its ways. She told me that to excel in English, you need to be passionate about it and yet think of it clinically. I also learnt that the ever-expanding universe is never the limit, that no matter how much you succeed in life, there is always something yonder to follow. However, one of the most cardinal maxims she taught me, one that is still deeply embedded in my mind, is how 'Brevity is the soul of wit.' A simple message, scrawled in red at the end of an unnecessary ten-page long analysis. However, to this very day, I've kept to that as if it were the Holy Book.

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