'What kind of light should an educator share with his or her students?' This is the million dollar question that keeps bothering me.

In the hope of easing my mind, I asked third year university students in my class: 'What do you want to take home from this class?' Their replies varied from an A to a pass. No one said he or she was there to learn.

I thought that getting a high grade was good enough motivation but apparently I was wrong.  

So I changed my teaching style to make them more enthusiastic ' not much effect. I made the lecture material more interesting ' still, little effect. I gave them longer breaks ' they disappeared. And when they did come back, their minds were elsewhere. What was lacking? Why the disinterest?

Feeling ultra-frustrated, I reflected on my years of learning, thinking, 'When did I learn most and how?'

There was a time when I hated English so much. I liked Bahasa Indonesia and did not need an extra language but the school decided high school students had to learn some English.

As expected, my English test came back with a miserable grade and the teacher called me up, pinching me in front of the class -- a huge embarrassment which pushed me to study for a good grade.

But it was not until four years later that I finally knew the joy of learning.

My English teacher then, Hermanto, was the most enthusiastic teacher in school, spoke beautiful English loudly in class and wrote on the blackboard energetically.

His class was the best but my aversion toward the language was sealed, no teacher could change that, or so I thought.

One day, he herded us into the TV room, a tiny space he had newly setup in one corner of our little school library. Apparently, we were to watch a Hollywood movie ' without subtitles. Trying to understand it was simply a mission impossible.

We were puzzled about the waste of time but nobody complained.

There were two or three more such sessions and then it stopped; maybe he finally realized it was useless.

But later on, whenever I went to the cinema, I tried to catch the dialog. When I heard English, I tried to imitate it. When I listened to songs, I deciphered the lyrics. At home, I started watching CNN rather than sinetron TV series until one day I realized I did understand what the news anchors said. Hooray.

I never thanked my teacher since I assumed he did not do much ' I learned most on my own.

Later on, I watched a clip on an experiment, called Hole in the Wall, conducted by an education researcher Sugata Mitra in India.

His team placed an Internet-connected PC inside a wall in urban slums and then put up a hidden camera nearby to film what would happen. Soon, kids started circling the foreign item, playing with it, learning on their own to operate it and they even went online. Soon, the children could use the Internet.

Mitra concluded kids can teach themselves and others when they are motivated enough by curiosity and peer interest.

Only then it dawned on me that my teacher 'put the PC in the wall' and sparked my curiosity. With my new interest, I found the three-hour-a-week English class was not enough.

Just like what my teacher did for me, I decided I needed to lay the basic foundation and entice my students to add more on to it.

From my peers' observations, I concluded that successful people were not always those who scored plenty of As. But some C and D students, who were belittled during school days, were doing so well in their careers. Some shared a common quality ' their enthusiasm, the sparkle in their eyes.

Next lecture session, I ditched the lesson plan and played them two TedTalk videos about passion in work and about confident postures. It was in English and there was a lot of yawning. Some just glanced, but even that was good enough.

What I wanted them to see was the speakers' enthusiastic eyes ' the eyes of those who love what they are doing. They only need to light up their curiosity, and hopefully enthusiasm.

Did it work? Honestly, I don't know.

Over a decade ago my teacher might just have been testing a new method and he probably thought he failed. Little did he know, he gave the best gift a teacher could ever give ' he lighted up the sparkle in my eyes. I simply pass it forward.

' Mariani Dewi

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