Article #54: The New Blue Dress

'The New Blue Dress', seems to be a known title. Isn’t it? Well, just to make sure that you don’t end up with a wrong guess, let me give you a hint. It’s one of the lessons that we studied when we were in the school. Hope now you are able to recall on when did we study. Yes, it’s the first lesson in English for all the 8th class students of SSC. 

Before you come to a conclusion that I am going to teach you or remind you the lesson again, let me tell you that the concept of this inspiring story, ‘The New Blue Dress’ is just the baseline of this article.

Well, to brief you about the story that we all read during our school times, ‘The New Blue Dress’ is all about a little girl and her teacher from Gates Avenue, Cleveland. The little girl always used to come to the school untidy with a dirty dress seeing which her teacher feels unhappy and gifts her a new blue dress. The little girl wears it, seeing that the girl’s mother feels ashamed to be dirty when her daughter is so clean and starts using a table cloth on the kitchen table. Upon looking this, her father starts repairing the fence and the family begins to make a garden. 

The man in the next house watches all this and starts painting his house and then a young minister notices how these two families are trying to make decent homes. The minister arranges a pavement, streetlight and running water for Gates Avenue. Six months after the little girl gets her new blue dress, Gates Avenue becomes a tidy street where respectable citizens live. 

People in other places hear the story of Gates Avenue and begin to organize their own cleanup campaigns. Who knows what will happen when a teacher gives a little girl a new blue dress? 

Similarly, even my Teacher motivated me a lot. Of course, not with a new blue dress, but with her teaching. Coincidentally, it’s the same English Teacher who taught me this lesson, The New Blue Dress. 

20 years back, the school just reopened after the summer holidays. I was in my 8th Standard and it was afternoon first hour in the school on the first day. Every one of us know heard about our Teacher, but never heard her lessons as she used to teach for only higher standards (that is from 8th to 10th class). I still remember how beautifully she taught us this first lesson, “The New Blue Dress” by presenting her own analysis and stressing on the fact that the title of the story plays a vital role here. I became a huge fan of her teaching, maybe that is the reason I still remember this lesson even after such a long duration. 

Her way of teaching was always unique. She used to involve the students every time by allowing us to read out the paragraphs of a lesson individually and then explaining about them. Not just that, even while dictating the notes, she used to ask us to read out the questions from the text book so that we could correlate with what we were writing about.  

Along with excellent teaching, she used to motivate us to read the story books apart from our class text books. I used to buy the very famous Akbar Birbal and Ali Baba 40 thieves' books that time and read them along with an English Dictionary beside to understand the hard vocabulary. This way, we learned from her on how to be self-sufficient. In fact, I got this habit of reading the story books only because of her. I used to read the same non-detail text books for twice or thrice trying to imagine the story in my brain and every time I read, I used to find something new in it, may it can be the vocabulary or the perception or a better way of imagination. I even used to write my own Diary every day in English in which I used to include the new phrases or vocabulary that I could find in the story books.  

Besides all this, my English Teacher used to encourage us to participate in other activities like background singing and spiritual songs. She used to provide me the guidance for all the various thoughts that I present to her. Well, we used to have this special segment in our evening prayers called, ‘Thought of the Day’ wherein any student can present one beautiful thought on stage. I used to collect so many thoughts from my father’s office diary and get them verified by my Teacher. She used to guide me on what could be presented and what not like there was one thought that says, “Doctors are the ones who kill our ills with their pills and kill us with their bills”. My Teacher used to say that such truths cannot be revealed and those thoughts wouldn’t inspire the students. 

I remember so many lessons taught by her like The New Blue Dress, The Hound of Baskerville, The Great Expectations, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and so on. It was only my Teacher who used to take the extra efforts in teaching me separately whenever I miss her class and visit her house. 

All and All, I would say just like how a teacher was able to motivate her student in looking clean and tidy with a new blue dress, my Teacher as well motivated me in developing the interest in the subject, language, communication, vocabulary, writing & Delivery and helped me in polishing my own skills as well as emerging with a new set of skills.  

Also, if the family, neighbors and thereby the society gets inspired with a new blue dress of a little girl that was gifted by her teacher, I feel that today if any of you are inspired with any of my articles or the scripts in this podcast, it’s all because of the motivation and the skills that were gifted to me by my English Teacher. Thank you so much Teacher for everything 😊