Question

Read the essay and answer the following questions

a.why did the teachers' encourgagement matter so moch to him?
b.what did the author's mother mean by encouraging the author "to get all the education he could"?
c.why do you think teachers and parents have great influence over you?How do they shap your personality and actions?

… My teachers became the new fi gures of authority in my life. I
trusted their every direction. Each book they told me to read, I read
and then waited for them to tell me which books I enjoyed. Th eir most
casual opinions I adopted. It was their encouragement that mattered
to me. Memory caressed each word of their praise so that the compliments
teachers paid me in grammar school classes come quickly to
mind every day.
… Always did I know my parents wanted for my brothers and me
the chances they never had. Mother would always say, “Get all the
education you can. With education you can do anything”.
Whereas my mother saw in education the opportunity for job advancement for my father education implied
an even more startling possibility: escape from a rather busy world. He despised the unimportance of higher
education, the infl ated grades and cheapened diplomas, the half-education that increasingly passed for mass
education in my generation.
… When time came to go to college, my mother demanded to know, “Why aren’t the colleges around here
good enough for you? Why do you need to go so far away? Why do you have to put us through this big expense?
You know your scholarship will never cover it”.
But when September came she said nothing more about my leaving.

Answer 1

a. The teacher's encouragement mattered because they were the figures of authority in his life and he did not want to disappoint them. 
b. His mother believed that through education he can achieve more things in life. Get a better paying job and be better situated. 
c. Teachers and parents are the models that we follow, the figures of authority. That is why they are so important to us and they shape our personality and future through their actions. Even though sometimes they we think that they are unfair to us they only want what is best for us and they are trying to teach us how to be better humans.