On Vietnamese Teachers' Day, our generation of students hopes that teachers will always love and maintain their noble profession.
"The teacher still silently goes early and comes back late/ Every day, drops of sweat fall and smudge the pages/ To bring me to the shore of my dreams"...
The poignant, passionate lyrics of the song "The Teacher" by musician Nguyen Nhat Huy must be very familiar to many generations. I believe that many people know and have sung this song at least once to remember the time when they went to school with their beloved teachers.
To me, the song "The Teacher" is like a tribute to a teacher who devoted his whole life to loving and giving his all to his beloved students.
Back then, my hometown was poor. The school was just a row of single-storey houses with simple tiled roofs. It was simple and rustic, but the love between teachers and students was limitless. My teacher cycled 20km to the village school every day. The school had a group of poor, mischievous students.
The day he came to school, we admired him very much. Because he was a good teacher for many years in the city. His eyes were serious but his smile was different, warm and gentle.
During the first year of secondary school, a math badass like me was always afraid of the teacher's class, worried about being tested on old lessons. And there was also a time when the teacher made me stand in the corner of the classroom and make me copy the lesson 100 times because I forgot my notebook and skipped homework.
But he didn't let us hate math. He patiently helped us love the subject more. His house was far from school, so in order to instill a passion for math in his students, he asked to stay at school to tutor us every evening.
Under the dim light, the teacher's hair seemed to have turned grayer, but his math problems went from difficult to easy. From a child who was afraid of math, I loved this subject more. Square roots and identities that used to be difficult for me were different now. I boldly volunteered to go to the board with confidence after days of being tutored and guided by the teacher. At that time, there was no concept of extra teaching and learning, so my parents could only thank the teacher with bunches of vegetables, baskets of potatoes, and bags of rice that the family made. But the teacher refused to accept them.
He followed us through 4 years of school. As we little students grew up, the more we loved math, the more gray hair he had. And now, perhaps when mentioning the song "Chalk Dust", I remember the most the line "Teacher, I have memorized/ This morning's lesson on the podium/ There is chalk dust flying on your hair". Did chalk dust turn my teacher's hair gray? Those are the gray hairs of the sacrifice and silent dedication of many "ferrymen", including my teacher. He still quietly cycled 20 kilometers back to the village school, giving us hope, inspiring the poor students' love of learning, helping us boldly step out of the bamboo fence to succeed, to have a brighter future.
Now, my teacher is of a rare age. Most of his former village school students have settled in the city.
Once a year, we visit our teacher on the occasion of Vietnamese Teachers' Day, November 20. We express our gratitude and recall old memories with him.
His eyesight is now dim, his legs are slow, but every time he meets us, he feels young again. To him, even though we are grown up, fathers and mothers, we are still as young as ever. He still remembers the little students who were lazy to study, forgot their notebooks, forgot their books, and he wrote them down in his notebook, took out his anger, blew out the tires, and accused him of walking several kilometers in the blazing sun to find a place to fix them. He also remembers the cold and rainy weekends when he and his students grilled corn and boiled sweet potatoes. In the summer, he spent the whole vacation tutoring math, teaching us how to sing, how to swim...
Memories of my teacher are always full and his contributions are endless.
On the occasion of Vietnamese Teachers' Day, November 20, our generation of students hopes that teachers will always love and maintain their noble profession. We also always remember the saying: "If you want to cross the Kieu bridge, you must cross it/ If you want your children to be good at reading, you must love their teachers."
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