There is a strange feeling you get when you are a teacher. It's that you feel responsible for the students in your class. This feeling of responsibility isn't just towards child students, but adult students as well. I always feel like if there is some emergency like an earthquake, that it's my responsibility to get the students to safety and not leave any behind. That the teacher should only make it out if all the students make it out.
Thankfully I have never faced a situation like this, however there is one teacher in Taiwan who did, Ching-Chuan Lin. Ms. Lin was the teacher at a kindergarten in Taipei who died saving the lives of her students from a bus fire in 1992. There were 50 people on the bus, 23 died. The survivors tell the story of Ms. Lin's heroics.
They were on a field trip and the bus company wasn't very good. The fire extinguishers had expired, and the bus had a lot of spray paint cans on it cause instead of making repairs they just sprayed over the damaged parts of the bus. When the fire broke out, Ms. Lin helped many of the children to get off the bus. By the time firemen had gotten there, she had died holding four more children in her arms, trying to get them off the bus.
In 1996 the above statue was to commemorate her was completed. It is called "Burning Phoenix Becomes A Butterfly." The statue seems a bit disturbing as she is surrounded by flames. But this also seems to bring out just how amazing her feat was. As a final piece of recognition, she became the first female and the first civilian to honored in Taiwan's Martyr's Shrine. Martyr's Shrine is a site in Taipei which honors the soldiers who died for the Republic of China, meaning in the wars that lead to the founding of the Republic of China, during it's reign in China, and then coming over to Taiwan.
