A Memorable Teacher

The schooling system and the student-teacher relationship in Bangladesh are very different than in New York. We were afraid of the teachers and never asked for help because asking questions was considered rude, but it never stopped me from learning by myself. The school I attended from first through 12^th grade was St. Francis Xavier School. We had separate schools for girls and boys. We had to stand up when the teacher entered the classroom and when participating in the class. We had to memorize poems, and almost the whole textbook for each course. The teacher would call on students. If the student failed to recite the answer word for word from the book, she had to spend the rest of the class standing, or she had to stand outside of the class so that other students and teachers would see her. Sometimes teachers would beat us with a ruler on the knuckle. Sometimes we had to write “I will never come to school unprepared” 100 times, or we had to hold our ear lobes and keep standing for the rest of the class.

When I was in Bangladesh, I never loved math. I hated trigonometry. I hated proving the sides of an Isosceles Triangle, or finding the area of a rhombus or parallelogram, and I especially hated the Pythagorean theorem. I could not get the idea of proving a²+b² = c², especially when I had to memorize the whole proof from the textbook. I was in seventh grade at that time. My math teacher, Mrs. Lokhkhi Rani called on me to come to the board and prove the Pythagorean theorem. Mrs. Rani was in her 40’s. She would enter the classroom like a tornado and start saying, “Children, open page number 50 and start doing problems 1 through 15.” She would walk around and see what the students were doing. If she saw any students stuck with one problem, she would slap the student on the cheek or back.

When I went to the board to prove the Pythagorean theorem, my brain and body froze. I tried to remember the first step of proving the theorem. I could not remember anything because I did not understand the method; I had just memorized it. When Mrs. Rani stood next to me, my whole body started shaking. I was ready for the slap, but she surprised me and ordered me to go back to my seat. I was surprised and could not believe that she did not humiliate me. After that incident, I started going for tutoring and tried to understand the methods of proving trigonometric functions instead of trying to memorize them. Even though I did not receive 90’s, I passed with a good grade. Mrs. Rani taught me to think “outside of the box.” I will never forget Mrs. Lokhkhi Rani and that day.