Patterns of a professor THE gap in time is wide. Scores of years have whisked past and many things have happened in between which have changed the very face of the national education scene. And yet when Prof Dr Jayakaran Mukundan, a recipient of the 2013 National Academic Award for teaching is asked about the influences in his life that had contributed to this outstanding success, his reply is immediate. “My Standard One teacher Miss Ong Siok Lay,” he says without hesitation and offers me the correct spelling of her name. “It was 1963 and I was a shy and frightened six-year-old, unused to crowds. Being dyslexic I had a major problem with the letters of the alphabet. “I remember how Miss Ong would go round the classroom and stop at every desk, beside every child. When she saw how I had inverted my ‘b’s and ‘d’s she would hold my hand and guide my pencil strokes until I got them right. “And even when I didn’t, instead of looking at the mistakes, she would hold my paper up as if it was a masterpiece and say ‘very good, you’ve got some right’. Then she would point to the little row of patterns we all had to do at the end of every page. “I was good in art, fortunately, and she would tell the whole class. ‘Look at Jaya’s patterns. Aren’t they beautiful?’ When she said that, it was as if the sun suddenly came into the classroom and all my inverted letters didn’t matter so much anymore,” says Prof Jayakaran. read more: thestar.my/News/Education/2014/11/30/Patterns-of-a-professorOur-columnist-comes-away-impressed-with-an-awardwinning-professor-who-attribu/
Posted on: Sun, 30 Nov 2014 23:56:15 +0000
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