A Teacher is a Person I can be Sincere with

     

      Today, in Carrie’s class, I learned something very important. We had already discussed the criteria of a good teacher a few days ago. We all agreed that enthusiasm, devotion, academic knowledge, psychology, and along with a lot of other qualities, are the criteria people use to evaluate a teacher.
      But today, while we were discussing something else, I realized another quality—a personality to be more specific—is also something a good teacher should have. During the class, Carrie recollected the years she was teaching in China. She described a rather distant and remote China, strange yet familiar to most of us. That China was poor, there weren’t  any machinery, people did everything with their hands. That China was also simple, everything was simple, relationships between people were simple, what people were working for was also simple, to live and be content. The young American teacher marveled at how hard her Chinese students were studying under difficult situations , the Chinese students treated their young American teacher with respect and admiration.
      It seems to us that Carrie’s voice or the language she used had a touch of magic, we were all attracted by her description. When Carrie said how she asked her mother not to let her come back to China no matter how she missed the people there, her eyes filled with tears. All of a sudden, I found myself trying to choke back my tears, and my classmates—Cherry, Cecilia, and Anna, they were either sobbing silently or choked up. Maybe people would say that Carrie revealed her vulnerability by shedding tears, it’s not something appropriate for a teacher to do in front of his or her students. But in my opinion, a good teacher ought not to conceal his or her true feelings in front of the students.
      We understood why Carrie shed tears, she asked her mother not to let her return to China because she was afraid the China she saw would be different from the China she used to know. Most importantly, it’s the people. Carrie did not want to find out what tremendous pressure her former students were under trying to make a living in a much changed China. But despite all this Carrie missed the country she had lived and worked when she was young, she missed her students she used to be friends with. We understand all this because deep down, we also miss the China when we were children, miss the time when were so happy, so carefree. We were also touched by Carrie, by her friendship with China, by her sacrifice of her youth when working in China.
      A lot of us have claimed to be the friends of our students, but sometimes we forgot what Emerson had said, “A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.”