My Students, My Teachers — Forty years of stories from a teacher who believed that every lesson worth remembering began with a human being, not a textbook.
Being one among many talented children is not an easy thing. A classroom full of brilliance has its own quiet cruelty — not born of malice, but of simple arithmetic. There is only so much light to go around, and the brightest flames draw the most eyes. Even a beautiful parrot may go unnoticed in a garden of colourful parakeets and magnificent peacocks. She is lovely; she is real; she is simply not, in that moment, the most spectacular thing in the room.
Shakila was the parrot.
Studious and humble, she had made a quiet name for herself at school — not through spectacle, but through steadiness. Her handwriting was neat, her manner courteous, her conduct beyond reproach. Her teachers were pleased with her, in the way that teachers are pleased with children who cause no trouble and complete every task. She was good. She was reliable. And underneath all of it, though none of us saw it clearly enough, she was longing — simply, achingly — to be noticed. Not merely approved of. Seen.
Her moment came, as such moments sometimes do, through responsibility. As a senior student, Shakila was entrusted with a place on an organising committee for a school event. It was, in the grand scheme of things, a modest appointment — but to her it was everything. She threw herself into it completely, working with the focused devotion of someone who has waited a long time for an opportunity and intends to waste none of it.
The event was a success. Well-conducted, well-received, worthy of the effort she had poured into it. For a brief, shining interval, Shakila was on cloud nine.
And then something happened.
I do not know precisely what it was — I did not ask, and she did not tell me, and I am not sure, even now, that the details matter as much as the aftermath. She had done something that put her down in the eyes of her classmates — something that, in the unforgiving moral economy of adolescence, was judged harshly and punished without appeal. Her friends withdrew. The recognition she had only just tasted was replaced, swiftly and completely, by something that looked very much like shame.
In two months’ time, her self-esteem had been quietly, thoroughly trampled. She withdrew into herself. She was ignored. She was forgotten.
I noticed the change. Of course I noticed — a teacher who has spent time with a child knows when the light goes out, even if she cannot name the precise moment it happened. I told myself I was being tactful. I told myself that not drawing attention to it was a kindness, that she would recover on her own, that teenagers are resilient and that time heals what a teacher’s clumsy words might only worsen.
I said nothing. I did nothing. I looked away.
Years passed. I saw her once, at a market in Madurai. She spotted me from a distance and slid into the shadows — deliberately, quietly, the way a person does when they are not ready to be found. And in that single, wordless moment, the full weight of what I had failed to do came at me all at once.
What had I done to heal her wound?
Nothing. I had recorded her marks faithfully. I had noted her neat handwriting and her reliable conduct. I had watched her unravel and chosen, in the name of tact, to look the other way. A word — one genuine, unhurried conversation — might have been enough to tell her that a mistake does not erase a person, that the judgment of one’s classmates is not the judgment of one’s worth, that she was seen and valued and not as alone as she felt. I had that word. I did not offer it.
She slipped away between the market stalls, and I let her go.
Looking back now, with the compound vision of a teacher and a student of human nature, I see what I could not see then. A promising bud — quiet, diligent, hungry for acknowledgment — was nipped. Not by one careless hand, but by two: the immature righteousness of her peers, and the deliberate silence of a young teacher who mistook inaction for wisdom.
A classroom is not merely a place where subjects are taught. It is a place where children learn — from us, and from each other — what they are worth. When we look away from a child in pain, we are not being neutral. We are teaching her something. We are telling her, with our silence, that her suffering is not quite important enough to interrupt the lesson.
No child is entirely white or entirely black. No mistake is the whole of a person. Parents and teachers must not only instil values — they must also make allowance for children to stumble, to err, to be forgiven, and to rise. A second chance, offered at the right moment, can change the entire trajectory of a life. I knew this. I simply did not act on it.
If it is not too late — and I choose to believe it is never entirely too late — I send this note across whatever distance now lies between us.
Shakila, you were seen. You were worthy. The mistake you made was smaller than the punishment you gave yourself for it, and smaller still than the silence I offered when you needed a voice. I am sorry I was not braver when you needed me to be.
I hope you are well. I hope you have found your way into the light.
A teacher’s job does not end at the last bell. Sometimes the most important lesson we can offer is the one we give not from the front of the room, but quietly, to a child who is disappearing — before she is gone.