The innocence of children

Now I have a job; a part-time tutor at the tuition centre. You know, teaching kids/secondary students; helping them with their homeworks and some questions paper to prepared them for their upcoming exams.

One day, I was teaching this little student of mine, lets name him as *B , still in primary school and has a very innocent look. At first I thought he was a very shy kid but every lessons we had together, he finally shows his true-colours and I can assume that he's kind of a talkative student and loves to ask questions! Cute! :D

I was teaching B to arrange the scattered words to become a sentence, and since he's still in primary 3 and not a fluent speaker of English or Malay (Well you know, kids.. ) he has this problem which is couldn't pronounce some of the English words correctly. Aware of his problem, I kept on drilling him to repeat the word over and over again. I love to drill my students, especially those who is quite weak in pronunciations, I'll "torture" them to keep on pronouncing the words till they will memorize it.

That day, I taught him to read the whole sentence after he managed to arrange all the scattered words to be a correct sentence. I couldn't recall the whole sentence, but what I remember the most was, we were talking about a school Hall, and he kept on reading "Hall" as "Hell".

Me : Okay B, this is Hall. Say H-A-L-L , HALL.

B : Hell!

Me : No, its HALL. Repeat, HALL.

B : Er, HELL!

Me : HALL, one more, HALL!

B : Hell!

The above conversation goes over and over again until he finally gets to pronounce it perfectly! Bear in mind that in some cases, there are kids who unable to pronounce the word just the same like we did, I don't know why but I've seen few of my students before who has the same problem like B. It needs our perseverance to deal with them and keeps them practising it, I know he's striving too hard, but at least he had his effort. Then B's required to rewrite the sentence in the space given, before that, I'd showed and explain to him what is Hall and the school hall together with the pictures, that moment he asked me;

"Teacher what is HELL? I want to see the HELL, can you show it to me?"

And his mouth is pouting to my ipad, giving a sign for me to google the pictures of hell for him. I was so shock actually, looking at him who had this curiosity look to know the answers, I took my ipad and googled the pictures for him.

The images I found were all picturing that Hell is full with fire in all over the place, I started to explain to him that Hell is a very hot place, like a sweltry room that is causing a sensation of heat and burning, the bad people will go to the hell as one of the images showed that there were people standing inside of the fire. Then he murmured;

"Teacher.. Why the bad people go to the Hell?"

I was stunned, not expecting that he was going to ask me that! Luckily one of the teacher who was witnessing and listening to our conversations; she helped me to answer B's questions, saying that when we did a lot of hurtful things towards other people in this world and when we die soon, we will be punished in Hell. She added more that we should do a lot of good things as long as we lived, serve and do the right thing to everyone as long as we could.

He smiled and nodded, as a courtesy of giving us the sign that he finally understood and had all the answers he wanted to know. I gasped and glancing at my friend, and smiled; knowing that we finally had made a good job as a teacher in telling B of what he should know without involving any harsh words that could make all the explanation had no sense at all for a 9 years old kid like B.

I asked him continue his sentence, that he gave me another curious look at say;

"Teacher, the HELL is at upstairs right? How about the HEAVEN?"

This time His index finger pointing pointing above his head, then started to ask me the same questions he asked about hell just now. I know that I shouldn't ignore his question this time, I answered all his questions politely just like the way me and my friend told him about Hell just now, but now is all the opposite things about Hell.

Literally just like the when we did the good thing, we will go to the Heaven and explaining all kind of good stuffs related to Heaven.. I also googled him pictures and all that I could find were all potrayed Heaven which is a place with a long white stair, surrounded by the clouds and glowing Angels standing beside. How sweet is that?

B shows a face of satisfied with all the answers he had. I smiled!

Talk about being a good teacher *kunun*