问吧乐享奖学金文章1－Volunteering is never so easy高中志愿者教师故事分享

Should I quit?

Should I just, quit?

I licked my chapped lips and kept asking myself. Two young French-Chinese kids sitting in front of me stared at me with questioning eyes.

Just quit, that’s what Mrs. Liu said. A class with only two students is never worth the rental charge, and she totally means it because she had so many other ideas going on. With a huge classroom like this, she could’ve taught a big origami class filled with middle school kids or an Asian cooking session for those recipe-obsessed moms. She could totally run that. “You know there is a chance to get more students next term, Miss Yang.” She kept telling me this in the morning right after I got out of the car, and didn’t stop mumbling as she opened the classroom. She could totally run that.

Just quit, that’s what I was whispering as I turned around from my students. My head still hurt after pulling a couple all-nighters this week for all kinds of competitions and tests. Besides school, there was the violin waiting for me to practice, and my friends in the quartet were complaining about the performance schedule last week. Why would I even bother to come in here and teach only two students who couldn’t even spell my last name right? Why would I spend so many hours on such a small class? My homestay family didn’t enjoy the driving that much.

Well then, I’ll just quit! I’ll send Mr. Liu an email and this little class will be a past nightmare.

I made up my mind and finally felt a bit better teaching. My students, Samantha and Lucy, tried really hard to copy down the notes with a short crayon in their chubby hands. I covered only two characters, writing 鳥(bird) and 竹(bamboo) in different ways over and over, showing Lucy how to make a bird by paper cutting and sketching birds and bamboo on Samantha’s notebook. I told them to stare at the character for one minute and they screamed excitedly as they figured how the dot in 鳥(bird) looked exactly like its eye and the curve was its little head with a giant feather on top, while 竹(bamboo) had long leaves on top of two rods hidden inside the character.

Later in the day I started writing the email to Mrs. Liu, saying that I was trying really hard to join them to make Fredericton a beautiful diverse town, and that I always wanted to spread Chinese culture to Canadian kids who were interested, but with a class like…

An email popped out.

I clicked it open and a picture jumped at me; it was a piece of loose leaf paper that had three birds sitting on a horizontal bamboo drew in crayons, and under each bird there was a big, 鳥(bird) character written heavily in vivid color. At the right corner the same writing said “Lucy, mommy, and daddy”. It was from Lucy’s mom; she used the most beautiful words to describe the two characters her daughter taught her today, “It is incredibly amazing how this language could be expressed in such an artistic way, and Lucy was super excited to show us that she could draw and write a word at the same time. I never thought this mysteriously language could be this much fun to learn. It’s just amazing! Thank you so much!”

I went speechless for a moment and found myself grinning, with tears streaming down my cheeks.

I began to tap the backspace key since I got a new start of my email.