My class, in addition to participating in the Literature Faculty's cultural night, also made a wall newspaper to show gratitude to our senior teachers who contributed to laying the foundation for generations of pedagogical students to spread out to all regions.
I still remember, that year a classmate of mine returned from the army, who was a poet and an excellent student. In addition to the poets and writers of his country, he also loved French poetry with Apollinaire, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon; Chilean poetry with Pablo Neruda; Indian poetry with Rabindranath Tagore... Around the beginning of November, thinking one night, in the morning he went to the lecture hall and excitedly said: Our class will make a wall newspaper called Hoa dang , meaning flowers offered to teachers. When asked, I found out that he borrowed the idea from the collection of Poetry Offerings by the famous poet Tagore to name the title for the class's magazine. That memory, now exactly 40 years later, I still remember it clearly.
Then after 4 years, we graduated and went our separate ways. I went to the highlands, lived in a dormitory, and taught at a school with a corrugated iron roof and wooden walls. Most of the students were children from the new economic zones, gathering in that poor district town to live. Each class had a few ethnic minority students. The first class came to teach, the school had just opened, so there were two classes, grade 10 and grade 11. That year, there were 11 teachers, of which 10 were new graduates of Hue University of Education; there was one biology teacher, from Quy Nhon University of Education. I went from Hue to the second class, along with a physics teacher from Quang Binh. So there were 13 young single teachers, from far away in the highland district to teach students from all over: Thai Binh, Quang Nam, Cao Bang... In the dormitory, every night there was a guitar, we ate together, and in the afternoon there was a volleyball. Just like that, the school was built, laying the foundation for a school that later when I visited again, had over a thousand students, not to mention that the district had been divided into 3 districts and had established 2 more neighboring schools. In fact, if it were the old district administrative unit, there would be thousands of high school students graduating each year.
I still remember, every year, on November 20, we received gifts from the students: in good years, each teacher had a piece of cloth to make a shirt, the rest were products that the students grew at home such as green beans, chicken, and sticky rice. That day, a math teacher from Hue , came home from somewhere in the afternoon, with a chicken hanging on the handlebars of his bicycle, one side was screaming, the other side was a bag of sticky rice, he said with a smile: he met a student on the road, he sent it to you guys to celebrate Teachers' Day. So in the dim light of that night, we sat and ate chicken and sticky rice, the guitar strummed in the middle of the distant forest, in harmony with the gongs from some distant village. At ten o'clock at night, the electricity went out, because at that time the district had to use small hydroelectric motors, we lit a fire in the middle of the collective house yard, to sing to our heart's content. Even now, after so many years, I still remember those forest nights!
As the years go by, every time these days come, I remember with emotion the faces of the teachers who taught me and the students I taught, my classmates, some still teaching, some retired. I keep thinking, perhaps we are just hyphens in the past. I also do not forget that there are many who are no longer present, having gone to faraway lands.
Still, I still remember that flower from that year, a magical offering that always radiates fragrance from the mind!
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