My English Teacher Ms Jia Yang
The first impression I had on Ms. Jia yang was very impressive: a beautiful young lady with musical spoken English, and bright eyes smiling behind a pair of glasses. To me, this first impression of a female English teacher was fairly normal, and I thought to myself this lady possibly graduated from Beijing Foreign University.
Among the many lectures by Ms Yang's, what I still clearly remembered was the one she taught us how to listen to English songs. The song was “My Heart will go on" by Celine Dion, and it was my first time to know the name of Celine Dion. From this song, teacher Yang taught us about the rhyme and rhythm of English songs. Maybe this is the original reason why I like English songs and only like English songs with lyrics that has proper rhyme and rhythm.
Late on, I noticed a detail that in every class, Teacher Yang’s Dad would lead her to the classroom and went away. It astonished me when I found that Teacher Yang could not see! I could not image how she walked to me, looked at me, listened and corrected my pronunciation, and even more, her chalk handwriting on the black board was smooth, beautiful, and as always, she came back to put the dot and slash exactly on top of the handwritten: “i " and “t” after the necessary words. How could you image a blind one doing these above? It was from that moment I felt ashamed of myself: I got to learn English better!
Ms Yang went to Zhengzhou University when she was 15 years old, graduated and stayed at Zhengzhou University to teach English. Later on, she went to Chinese Academy of Sciences for her graduate study, and stayed at collage of graduate, CAS to teach English.
After my graduation, I did not pay much attention to Ms Yang’s newly progress. I always remind myself to improve my English bit by bit and day after day. Though I don’t make a huge progress, but I could proudly say I kept on learning it. It was until the passed Wednesday when I hosted Listening E-songs to practice listening skills that I found Teacher Yang made a huge progress on her career: she went to John F. Kennedy School of Government in 2000 and earned her MPA degree in 2001. Now she is the Vice Chairman of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and more titles. I felt proud of Ms Yang, and I felt ashamed for myself again. As I learnt from today’s one sentence translation: “In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years." and “The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall”. So, keep on learning and never stop, not only in English but everything! This is my new year resolutions.
