Teaching with love and compassion

Vimalathevy (left) during a farewell gathering for SPM examiners.

FOR many teachers, their jobs go beyond textbooks and syllabuses. The deeper impact of teaching helps nurture and shape a student’s character outside of school, at home and in later life. Even after decades have passed, veteran teachers still treasure the moments when they were able to make a lasting impression on their students.

One of retired teacher Noor Khamar Md Haniff’s personal initiatives when he was teaching in Penang was to impart life skills to students, going beyond conventional classrooms at the time.

“I would wait until the exams are over when students are awaiting their results to teach life skills. I would talk to them about how to behave at home, how to talk to their parents, how to maintain cleanliness,” says Noor Khamar, 84, who began teaching in 1958, spending two decades in the profession.

“Sometimes when we share stories with the students they laugh, but they also quietly internalise the things we teach. How to talk to elders, the importance of eating together as a family, and routine behaviours at home,” says the Malay language and Geography teacher.

Many years later Noor Khamar came across one of his students who was working as a matron in a hospital. She thanked him specifically for his life skills class.

“The students enjoyed the class... they said no one had taught them such things before,” Noor Khamar recalls.

He taught in several schools on Penang Island and Butterworth,

and kept strictly to one particular principle during his career.

“From the very beginning when I started teaching, my motto was not to harm any of my children (students). From the young ones to those in Form Five, all were good children,” he says.

“You go to school to educate people, you must love them and not shame them,” he says, disagreeing with the practice of physical punishment, or embarrassing students as a means of punishment.

Noor Khamar particularly enjoys teaching in multicultural settings as it serves as a learning experience for him.

Tan: ‘You need to love teaching and then you will give the best to your students.’

“When you teach (classrooms with) many races, you learn about different characteristics. We are in a multiracial country, it is good to face multiracial students,” he says.

Looking back, Noor Khamar has no regrets about becoming an educator. He has a simple, poignant message for aspiring teachers: Keep to kindness – “Be good to the students. Be kind to them and treat them as your own children and they will love you,” he advises.

“The moment they love you, they will accept your teaching.”

Facing different challengesWith distractions abounding, teachers today need to be extra creative to hold their students’ attention. This is not an easy task, sometimes requiring unconventional steps.

“Back when I was teaching in the afternoon session, I found teaching to be a challenge and so I thought of ways to get closer to my students,” says 53-year-old secondary school principal Tan Siew Choo.

“I decided that I need to know how to play Dota (Defense of the Ancients),” says Tan, who has taught in Kedah and Kuala Lumpur schools.

With her son’s help, Tan learned enough about the online multiplayer game to keep her students’ attention during mathematics lessons.

Lessons aside, teachers can sometimes find themselves in extremely challenging situations beyond everyday expectations.

One memory that remains vividly with Tan is from more than a decade ago. A student had got into a racially-driven misunderstanding outside of school resulting in an angry outsider coming to look for the student: “The outsider came into my class carrying an iron rod, wanting to hit my student. I don’t know how but I became brave enough at that moment to pull my student behind me and tell the outsider off in Mandarin. I said, if you want to beat someone, you can beat me first but you cannot touch my student,” she recalls with a nervous laugh.

Tan refused to let go of her student’s hand at that moment, as she did not want the situation to escalate. The incident was eventually settled without further aggravation, and Tan maintained a good relationship with the student she protected.

Years later, Tan’s colleague met the student again.

“The student said that he was scared of me, but that he also respected me,” she says, adding that the student had by then graduated school and settled down with a wife and children.

“It felt good that he still remembered me. When you hear of your students having a good family and doing well, it makes me feel happy as a teacher. It is like a big present to me,” says Tan, who has taught for more than 28 years.

If given a second choice, Tan would still choose to be a teacher.

“To me, if you want to build a new generation, you need to have passion and love your career. You need to love teaching and then you will give the best to your students.”

Their success is our successFor English teacher A. Vimala-thevy, seeing her students succeed in life is a cherished aspect of her career.

“I have seen changes in students, and to see them achieving their dreams and being successful is very satisfying,” says Vimalathevy, who is turning 60 in November and has taught in primary and secondary schools in Tapah and Ipoh, Perak, for 38 years.

With her retirement around the corner, Vimalathevy looks back on many great memories from decades of teaching.

“There was once a Standard One boy who was very shy and timid. His mother asked me to help him open up. Slowly, we talked and made friends with him, and from then on he would approach me and was always friendly,” she says.

“Then one day, the boy’s mother wrote a thank you note for me. I felt very touched,” she says.

Although the incident happened more than 30 years ago when Vimalathevy first started teaching, she still keeps the letter with her. In fact, Vimalathevy has kept many handwritten notes given to her by her students over the years.

Teaching has changed tremendously over the years. The teachers of today have to move along with the digital era and come up with digital classrooms, she observes.

“Teachers do not stop learning, and learning is a never ending process,” says Vimalathevy, who picked up IT skills in her 40s and is managing well with the new technology. “If you choose to become a teacher, do it with your heart and soul. You are given a blank canvas to paint, so you have to picture it beautifully for your students’ future.”