The world of Tzu Chi (Vol.109)

TZU CHI 109 53 To her surprise, I looked at her with tenderness in my eyes and said delicately, “It is possible for you to get a bacterial infection after ear piercing. So, you must remove the earrings before sleep and apply some ointment to prevent inflammation.” I did not at all request her to come to school without her earrings the following day. I reckoned that since I was new to the class, she might not take my advice, and I might lose my influence as a teacher if I made that request. Should that happen, it would be difficult for me to continue mentoring them. But what happened was, she stopped wearing earrings to school thereafter! I was overwhelmed by the power of love. Instead of praising her in front of her classmates, I wrote words of encouragement in her contact booklet (which served as a student-teacher communication platform) or in personal letters to her. That way, things were kept between us, and it protected her self-esteem. To her, praising her publicly would only make her feel uneasy, or even, embarrassed. I also slipped a bookmark with the Jing Si Aphorism : “Getting angry is actually punishing ourselves with the mistakes of others” in her contact booklet, hoping that she would stop displaying her temper so frequently. She appeared as if she did not care. Presuming that I would reprimand her, she shielded herself with a cold attitude. One day at around 7.20 am, I was marking the students’ homework while they passed their contact booklets from the back to the front of the class. Coincidentally, Xiao Ying walked into the classroom and handed her contact booklet to her classmate at the front row. But, that classmate accidentally dropped her booklet on the floor and the pages happened to reveal what she had written the night before. She was enraged and suspected that her classmate did it on purpose in order to have a glance at what she had written. “Phang!” She slammed her classmate’s table and kicked her chair, making the girl cry on the spot. At that time, I carried on with my marking work as if I did not hear anything because I did not have a really good solution to the situation at that time. It did not feel right for me to flare up, offer my advice, or use cajolery and coercion at the same time. So, I did not react for the time being. But in my heart, I wondered if Xiao Ying did it deliberately to get my attention, knowing that we had fostered a reasonably good teacher-student relationship. I reminded myself that I must not fall into her trap. After mulling over it for about ten minutes, and right after the self-study time was over, I requested her to see me at a quiet corner in the school away from the sight of others. Again, she appeared as if she did not care. Her heart was filled with resentment