Write a review on one of Catherine Lim's stories.
Review on Catherine Lim’s Little Ironies:
The Teacher
This story highlights the superficiality of an English teacher who pedantically focuses solely on his students’ language abilities – revolving around the grammar, structure of their essays without comprehending the content.
His oversight and insistence blinds him to a student’s indirect distress signals of trouble in her family, and coldly dismisses her ambitions and honest plans for the future. It sends a simple message of how teachers can and should assume the roles of educators and mentors for their students and kids.
The teacher should not be so ignorant as to ignore what the student was trying to tell her. Instead, she must have read between the lines of the English essay rather than really trying to understand it. She could have at least tried to understand the girl’s situation but she did not. Instead, she tried looking for faults with the girl’s essay.
She knew that girl was talking about her father because she said this, “She was supposed to write a story with the title ‘The Stranger’ and all she did was write me a great deal of trash about her father … this composition is not only grossly ungrammatical but out of point …” She knew, yet she did nothing to relieve the girl of the burden she was carrying on her little teenage shoulders.
If I were the teacher, I would have tried to help her with her family problems too. Not just how she does in school. I would not just give her extra lessons, but also how she copes studying at home when she has to be working. But the teacher did nothing and she could not be helped.
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