Thursday, December 22, 2016

The Teacher Who Changed My Life

The Teacher Who Changed My Life
-        Nicholas Gaze

In the essay, "The Teacher Who Changed My Life", the writer, Nicholas Gaze has clarified how a good teacher can really transform the life of students. A good teacher does not provide a fish to eat but he rather teaches him how to fish. So that the students could eat fish throughout the life. In other words, a good teacher explores the potentiality of the students and consequently the students become the successful citizen in the future. The writer himself was a refugee boy who came to America with the trauma of his mother's death. He would like to forget his bitter past but his teacher, Marjourie Hurd changed it into a successful writing. As a result, he became a successful journalist as well as a writer. According to the writer, he was born in 1939 in Greece. At that time there was a radical communist movement in Greece due to which his mother was killed. He was just 9 years old when he lost his mother and he entered America with his two sisters as a refugee boy. His father was already in the USA and he detested his father for not saving his mother. As a refugee boy, Nicholas was sent to a low Graded school for 4 years. Only in 1953, he was sent in an English school where he met Miss Marjourie Hurd. Miss Hurd was the patron of the club named 'Newspaper Club' and he had been there following the most beautiful girl of his class. In fact, he why he joined the Newspaper club. Miss Hurd was a very strict teacher who made her students read the stories of immigrants and refugees. When she knew the pathetic story of Nicholas, she told him to write his own story as a refugee boy and the death of his mother. He did not like to unfold his bitter past however when Miss Hurd insisted, he wrote how his mother was killed mercilessly by the communist Guerrillas. His article made him well known all over his school and it was even published in the school magazine. After the publication of his first article, the writer understood the power of written words. Gradually, he began writing about his motherland and became proud on being born in Greece. He even promised to punish those people who had killed his mother.


Nicholas Gaze became so famous that he was even called by the President of his country America and his photo with the president were carried by his father in his pocket till he took the last breath. Though he did not like his father in the beginning, he adored him at the end because he understood the helplessness of his father. Even though he lost his parents, he always found Miss Hurd at his side with her inspiring words. If Miss Hurd was not his teacher, he would never become a journalist and a writer. In this way, it is the evident that a good teacher always makes the student explore the potentiality due to which the students become a successful citizen in the future.

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