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.
Freddie was barely one when I first met him. Curly-haired, wide-eyed, with a smile that arrived before he did, he had a way of winning hearts that required no introduction and no effort on his part whatsoever. His mother was a teacher and a dear friend of mine, and so I had the rare privilege of watching him grow almost from the very beginning — not as a student yet, but simply as a small, spontaneous bundle of joy who happened to wander into the corners of my life long before he ever sat in my classroom.
I have not, in all my years of teaching, met a child quite so naturally happy.
When Freddie joined my class in Grade IX, I began to observe him more keenly — and found, if anything, that he had grown more endearing still. He was genuine. He was caring, in the unforced way some children simply are, without performance or calculation. His strong ethical grounding, I came to learn, was his grandparents’ gift to him; his love of music came from his father; and his irrepressible spirit — that particular brightness that seemed to walk into a room before he did — was his mother’s, through and through. He enlivened every class he sat in, and his humour was the kind that made even reluctant learners look forward to a Monday morning.
He was not, by the usual measures, academically on top. He was not a topper. He was not, in the conventional sense, studious. And yet there was a spark in him that no report card could quite capture — a rare and curious blend of scientific temperament and genuine love for literature, the kind of mind that asks good questions in a chemistry lab and then goes home to read poetry for pleasure. His IQ, by every account, was high. He was simply different — and he wore that difference lightly, without apology and without complaint.
What appealed to me most was his sincere appreciation for anybody or anything worthwhile. He had not a tinge of envy for a classmate who was more “successful.” He celebrated their success.
He loved drama. He loved quizzes, experiments, debates, music — anything that asked him to think on his feet or feel something fully. Mathematics alone seemed to escape his enthusiasm; he never made the slightest effort to enjoy it, and never pretended otherwise.
In my English classes, he was always in form. Teaching him was, quite simply, a pleasure. He had a gift for adding joy to any situation he found himself in — lightening a dull afternoon, turning a difficult passage into something the whole class wanted to discuss.
After a Pre-Board examination, I picked up his answer paper with the particular eagerness a teacher reserves for a student she is fond of. The paper had four sections. The first was a composition — five topics offered, of which a student was expected to choose one and write accordingly.
What I found, instead, was five fully developed, well-written essays — one for every topic on the page.
Sections two, three, and four — left entirely untouched.
Horrified, I called him to my desk and looked at him with what I can only assume was the particular expression teachers reserve for moments like these. He explained himself simply, without a flicker of anxiety: he had liked all five topics, he said, and so he had decided to write all five.
He was not worried about marks. He was happy. And to Freddie, that was what mattered.
Years later, I look at where his classmates have landed. Many of them are now “successful” by every conventional yardstick — IAS officers, doctors, engineers, names that carry weight at a reunion. Freddie, for his part, is a leading quizmaster and a molecular biologist. But what sets him apart from the rest is not his profession at all. It is that he has continued, year after year, to do exactly what gives him happiness — without flinching, without apologising, without once mistaking other people’s definitions of success for his own.
To me, he is the truly successful man. He lives life — enjoying it fully, and along the way, making everyone around him a little happier too.
May his tribe increase.
Some children remind us that joy itself is a form of intelligence — and that a life well lived rarely looks like the one we were taught to expect.