A lesson from my teacher

On the occasion of teachers day, I would like to describe one incident that had a profound impact on my life. This is a tribute to my teacher, Jankiram sir.

I was in a boarding school for my 10th grade. This was couple of weeks before board exams and we were forced to whole day study hours. Someone got bored and started throwing paper rockets, soon, all of us were doing the same and it reached to a point where we started having tournaments.

We used to stand in balcony and throw rockets onto a timber factory next to our building and then check who's got the longest flight time, which one went farthest, ... This went on for a few days. Our wardens, teachers and other staff used to scold us, warned us to stop, threatened to call our parents, cancel hall tickets, ... None worked and our tournaments continued.

Then, there was this one teacher, whom most students respected. He just returned from vacation and we were thinking, what would he say?

As soon as he came to knew about this, he came to our study rooms, just looked at us and left. We were confused, as we were expecting some kind of scolding or stuff, but he simply left. When we saw out of balcony, to our surprise, we noticed him carrying a trash bag, cleaning up all the rockets we thrown. We then realized, how much mess we had made, ground and some of the machines was literally covered in paper and he was picking them one after other, alone. We shouted from top for him to stop cleaning, and we would do it instead, but he simply told us to get back inside and he cleaned it alone.

Guess what, from the next day, tournaments stopped. He never spoke about it or brought up that topic again, but that incident taught us all a lot of lessons. For me personally, it taught me three very important lessons.

• Our actions might affect others, learn to look from their perspective too. We never noticed that our play was effecting factory workers next to us.
• People follow your example, not your advice. No matter how many times other staff told us to stop, we didn't listen. But when we look at him cleaning, we knew we had to stop.
• Silence isn't empty, it's full of answers Had he scolded us or say anything to us, before leaving, it might not have any impact on us. His silence spoke a lot that day.

Finally, after exams, we asked him why did he not scold us and instead did what he did? He simply smiled and patted our heads.