Who do you think is the best teacher in your life? A teacherthat teaches very well? A fun looking teacher? A teacher who is very handsomeor pretty? Everyone has a different opinion. I think a teacher that can teachin many different ways and spends time with his or her students outside ofclass, is the best kind of teacher. If students have some problems, and theteacher is willing to work with the students to solve those problems, thatteacher is a perfect teacher in my mind. It doesn’t mean every single thingthat teacher does has to be perfect, because no one can be perfect all thetime. But there is a teacher that I think is close to perfect, and his name isMr. Watkins.
We all liked Mr. Watkins. He was very kind. Even thoughMr. Watkins was not our homeroom teacher, he sometimes helped us clean ourclassroom. He encouraged us by saying things like 「You did a great jobdecorating the bulletin board」 or 「Your classroom looks very clean.」 He alwayscheered us up by playing outdoor games with us during our elective classperiods.
I remember the day I first met Mr. Watkins. It was thefirst day of fall semester. We went into the English classroom when the bellrang. A curly yellow-haired teacher with glasses introduced himself as Mr.Watkins. Our new English teacher welcomed us with his twinkling eyes. He had avery deep voice and slow movements. Hewas wearing an old jacket with a small handkerchief in his left breast pocket. Becauseof the way he looked and acted, I thought English class would be very boringthat year.
Oneweek later, Mr. Watkins suggested that we do a 15-minute speech introducingourselves. So when I went home, I started to practice my speech.
At first, I couldn’t even get to three minutes. Ithought putting more words into my speech would help, but it didn’t work. Thedeadline was coming soon, and I finally reached three minutes but I couldn’tremember the words. When I practiced, every word that I remembered seemed todisappear, so it was very hard to finish my speech. I told myself again andagain, 「I will write my speech again, and I will do it as slowly as I can」.
When it was time to present my speech the next day, Itried to do it as slowly as I could, but I didn’t even reach three minutes.Each minute felt like two hours. I felt very angry at myself and also felt veryconfused and scared. But Teacher Watkins asked me some questions about myhobby. I was loosening up more thanbefore. I slowly and gingerly answered his question and the speech finishedwith a big applause from my classmates. This was a big success for me becauseit was my first public speech in front of people and this experience taught mehow to solve problems in a different way.
Finally,it was time to have our Mid-term Exams. Everyone was studying their subjects inpreparation for their exams. Mr. Watkinsmade a team project for our English Exam. I liked that he gave us new things todo, but I was with some people that I didn’t like very much. It felt like achore to work with them because I didn’t know them very well. I only knew theirnames and that they were little bit difficult students for other teachers. Wedidn’t meet until that weekend and the following week.
One day, Mr.Watkins asked me how my speech and presentation were going.
I told him I wasconfused about the presentation and that I was with a bunch of people that Ididn’t know really well, who didn’t even help to write the speech. He told me Ihad to be creative and solve the problem by myself and that doing so would helpme a lot.
He tried to makeme relax and he told me how to make a good speech in front of my classmates.Mr. Watkins tried to help me fix this project. He told me a lot of things thatcould help me. I tried to talk with my team members many times. It was appallingto me at first but they finally started to listen to me. We met on Saturday andtried to agree on our opinions and finish making the PPT. We separated members into two groups. Onefound information and one found pictures. Finally, we made a very excellent presentation.We even finished the speech! I felt very proud of our group.
They day wepresented, it was awesome, except some of my group members were gigglingbecause they were afraid about giving a speech. I explained every page andevery piece of information clearly. Everything was good and we got an 「A+」.
I learned how to work with a team. I was very friendlyto my group members and I thought it was a good chance to know about them. Imade more friends.
After this project, they were friendlier to me andalways asked me how to solve math problems or do projects with them again. Theyhave become good friends and help me a lot, too.
We did a lot of different speeches. Sometime, we have to solve some problems butit was fun. At the last month of the semester, we did a new kind of teamproject again. It was called 「Making aMovie Trailer」. Mr. Watkins told us weneed to make our stories by ourselves, and make a team with 4 or 5 people. We couldn’t stop giggling when we talkedabout this project.
We were very creative and we tried to makea horror story at first, but we changed to romance, however, we thought romancewas hard, so we changed it to horror again. We tried to make the video easy to understand, but some of the groupmembers couldn’t agree on the story. We wanted to make this movie trailerbetter than others and do something that no one had done before.
I thought we could make our story very funif we changed to comedy. Then I thoughtof a perfect story: different kinds of people living in one house, learning howto work as a team and why it is important to understand each other. I asked my group membersand they said it was a perfect story.
We made the video that afternoon. Mr. Watkins helpedus make the story more detailed and asked about our PPT. The presentation daycame we first showed our movie trailer and showed how we made this PPT. We alsoincluded our thoughts on the project in the PPT.
I felt proud of our team and thought that the project was a valuableexperience. Itwas a great chance to make my English better and I learned that making a film or movie is veryhard.It was especially fun when wetalked and thought about the story. Every time I watch that movie trailer now,I feel thankful to Mr. Watkins.
Because of Mr. Watkins, we did many things that we hadn’ttried before, and I found out I have good leadership skills; I can lead my teammembers to make a good project. I also learned how to make friends and how tounderstand them from Mr. Watkins. He told me that friends are very important toour lives. He helped me realize whatthings I can do well and what I have to improve.
Also, I learned how to debate in his class. I had such a good result that Iwanted to do a debate in Chinese. I learned how to stand up for my opinions,which was hard sometimes because some people had very strong opinions.
I remembered we sometimes pleaded with the teacher tomake the projects easier, but he made us do them anyway. I thought this wouldn’thelp me, but I thought wrong. Everything that Mr. Watkins did has helped me inthe rest of my life.