At grade 5 scholarship examination I scored 2nd highest marks in the Kandy district and enrolled at Ananda College as a grade 6 student.
My class teacher was a math teacher. She was a terrible person. She was very nasty to new students. She openly told that she was not happy at all about outstation students coming to Colombo taking the places that belong to Colombo kids. I felt she was specifically targeting me because she humiliated and punished me at every opportunity.
I was only 11 years old. I was new to Colombo and was lost and helpless.
I used to get all the attention from school teaches in Kandy. I was the school hero there. Suddenly in a new school I was facing a class teacher who behaved as if this small kid is her biggest enemy. She was making every day in school a misery for me.
I started losing confidence . My grades started falling. I was becoming nobody in a strange environment.
More than anything I started hating mathematics ; the subject taught by my class teacher.
Even though my class teacher didn’t continue with us after grade 6, I continued to hate math as a subject. Year on year it was getting worse. By grade 8 math was like Greek to me. I got only 35 marks for math’s paper in my last term test in grade 8. A fail mark for the first time in my life.
My uncle who was a school teacher at that time checked my ability in math’s and reported to my mother that I am hopeless in this subject. “This boy will never pass math’s subject at GCE A/Ls” was his prophesy which horrified my poor mother.
I continued to hate math’s in grade 9 too. I was still ordinary in my studies. But by that time I was involved in a few extra curricular activities. I had started following swimming classes and found I was a better swimmer than most others. I had joined the oratory club at school and there also I had begun to gain recognition as someone with talent.
While I was half way in grade 9 came the turning point.
We got a new math teacher. He had come from some other school so didn’t know anyone of us before.
Two weeks after joining the school some one had invited him to attend a session at our oratory club. I was one of the speakers that day and the new teacher in his address recognized me as some one with exceptional skills.
I was so touched by his comments. I felt proud. Bad news was that he was going to be our new math’s teacher. Soon he was going to find out the other side of my self.
From that day I was determined to impress the new teacher that my math skills are not bad either.
It is amassing how this newfound enthusiasm to impress a new teacher got my left brain functioning again. I started paying attention in the class. With that I started understanding the language of math’s once again. I started doing my homework diligently. I started giving right answers in the class.
The next two terms my grades improved significantly not only in math but also in other subjects.
In grade 10 class I came across another brilliant math’s teacher. Mathematics became my favorite and easiest subject once again. When I finished answering my GCE O/L math’s papers I was positive that my marks should be closer to 100 if not full marks. A few years later I entered University of Moratuwa to study Engineering having completed A/Ls in the math’s stream.
So much for my uncle’s prophesy that I would never pass math subject at GCE O/Ls.
Interestingly this grade 9 math’s teacher praised me on something else not on my skills on mathematics. He was appreciating my oratory skills. But he was very genuine in his praise that and I felt so proud of my self. The desire to maintain that positive impression in the class room made a world of difference in my approach towards studies from that point onwards.
We all have come across great teachers at one point or the other during our studies. This note is a tribute to all such teaches .
Source: fb page of Nalaka Godahewa
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