JULY 31 — It all began as a favour to my mother.

I was just back from a camping trip and at the time, was at my friend’s house, waiting for my parents to pick me up. I had known her family since I was in kindergarten so her family was almost like my own.

We were seated in the kitchen and her mother, Aunty Mim, was talking to me about something, and I was half-listening to her because I was on the lookout for my dad’s red Mercedes.

“So you’re going to be a ‘cikgu’?” she asked.

“Huh? No way!” I answered, surprised and somewhat annoyed she got that idea of me. I had no idea why she would think as such since being a teacher was never really on my list of ambitions, not even when I was in primary school. It had always been a journalist or a reporter since my paternal grandfather used to work for Utusan Melayu a long, long time ago, or a lawyer since I was quite the John Grisham fan. So I had no idea where she got the absurd idea from.

Aunty Mim smiled and told me my mother had told her that she had gotten hold of an application form for a teacher training programme from a mutual friend, and that I would be applying for it. I shook my head and was still somewhat annoyed that she would think I would want to be a teacher.

So when my parents arrived, I immediately asked my mother about what Aunty Mim had said. She told me about the forms that she had gotten and suggested I take a look at them before deciding anything. I folded my arms and told her I would do no such thing and that I wasn’t even going to consider it.

I suppose at the time the prospects of being in charge of kids who were high on sugar and need looking after didn’t seem so appealing. I had just turned 18, barely out of school and I really wasn’t too fond of kids.

I mean, when there are little babies around and people often crowd around them and go goo-goo, gaa-gaa over them, I never got into the whole thing.

To me, babies are just babies. They eat, they defecate and they sure can hurt your eardrums when they cry. And kids are just bigger babies; they need feeding, they have to go to the bathroom all the time and they ask way too many questions.

But since my mother kept asking, I looked at the forms, filled up and posted them, thinking I probably wasn’t fit to be even considered as a candidate.

However, I was pleasantly surprised when I got a postcard telling me I was to come for an interview at a local teacher training institute, which I went to with my father, whom upon meeting some friends there (he is a lecturer so he knew some of the lecturers there) waved me off into the interview room and told me it was going to be fine.

I tried to act all nonchalant and like I didn’t really care about the outcome at all, but the truth is, I did. I guess it was just the young me, wanting to see whether I was good enough to be trusted with such a huge responsibility of educating the future generation of Malaysia and I was excited to be able to make it that far.

I was sure a lot of people sent the forms in because according to the person my mother got the forms from, they ran out and didn’t have enough for everyone.

When I got into the waiting area, there were a couple of other people there and we were told we had to sit for an aptitude test before we proceeded to the interview.

I sat for the test, answered 135 questions in less than thirty minutes and walked out of the room feeling rather happy with myself. I suppose it was then that I decided maybe being a teacher wasn’t such a bad idea.

Both my parents are educators and they seem to enjoy what they do, although I hoped I wouldn’t end up like my father who gets ulcers and comes down with fever whenever it is exam season because he worries about his students’ results!

Then I was called in. I remember apologising to the interviewers for my English which I felt had gotten rusty since it had been a few months I was last at school. They laughed and we had a pretty good conversation about school and the things I did after finishing school. I walked out of the interview room feeling rather fantastic and was quite confident I would get accepted into the programme.

Waiting for the letter was agony. I couldn’t openly show I was excited about the programme since I had acted like I didn’t care about it before, so I had to keep my thoughts pretty much to myself. When the acceptance letter came one fine day, my parents were ecstatic and I was too, perhaps because it showed I did have something in me to be that person responsible to help shape the minds of future Malaysian leaders.

Looking back, it really was a blessing in disguise. The teacher training programme was long and the allowance we received was barely enough to cover our expenses. Many a time I asked myself why I even decided to be a teacher in the first place but then the kids I teach never fail to make me feel so blessed and happy.

They still talk too much and ask too many questions, are constantly in need of food or a drink of water and they ask to go to the bathroom once every two minutes, but I do love them to bits because they make me smile. It is because of them I do believe that if we all do our jobs right in educating and teaching them, Malaysia will be okay.

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.