Some teachers correct your sentences.
Every subject has a syllabus. English, in her classroom, had a heartbeat. Semicolons stopped being punctuation and became pauses worth taking. Poems stopped being homework and became mirrors. She’s teaching a new batch of students now, at a new college — but on this Teacher’s Day, a few of us finally wrote back.
The Best, Forever
An English classroom can go two ways: a checklist of tenses, or a door into every other way of thinking. Ma’am always chose the door.
She is the real beauty of English, real inspiration for teachers, real mentor of students and real heart of knowledge. Even though she is now guiding a different group of students but she lives always in our memory in the form of interactive lessons and everything she taught.
The whole class remembers and feels sad for the Summer holidays which took our ma'am far out of our reach. That holiday represents the beginning of onerous study and sisyphean homeworks, all brutally assigned to little children. That holiday marks the new beginning of era where HOMEWORK is coded as HOLIDAYS, OPRESSED as STUDENTS and WEEKLY as FORTNIGHTLY 😊.
- Language
- Grammar stopped being rules to fear, it became a toolkit for saying exactly what we meant and a subject of no-tension which reflected perfectly in every student's speech.
- Confidence
- The first time she taught a chapter, confidence of scoring well, or best, boosted with a blast of humour and knowledge and resulted the same.
- Stories
- She never just taught the chapter. She taught us the easily understandible story of integrated humour and glory alongside book's text.
- Voice
- Every red-pen comment in the margins somehow made the next letter easier to begin, next exam easier to written and next day, easier to predict.
Some lessons take years to bloom.
A good teacher doesn’t hand you a finished bouquet. She plants something, corrects your grammar for a few seasons, and trusts the rest to grow on its own time.
But, she left the unmatured plants, here, in the world of most cruelest brutality where sisyphean homeworks mysteriously reproduce and multiply overnight.
Here’s everything she helped to bloom.
Photographs never quite capture a good teacher. We tried anyway.
A few letters we never quite sent.
Drag sideways to read them — the way notes used to get passed across the last bench.
“You made me fall in love with words and literature, and even grammar which ws totally unexpected for a such analphabetic person. I never thought I’d say that about English.”
Shivam, your student
“You made grammar feel like music instead of maths. I still hear your voice when I proofread anything.”
A student who used to hate grammar
“Thank you for suggesting me the true meaning behind the words, true feeling behind story and true essence behind every sentence.”
Someone who now reads for fun
“Every time I use a semicolon correctly, use perfect tense or follow subject-verb agreement, I think of you. Every single time.”
A grateful grammar convert
“You didn’t just teach the poem. You taught us to notice things. That stayed long after the exam.”
One of your English batch
Happy Teacher’s Day,
Swati Ma’am.
For every essay you saved, every word you gave us the courage to say out loud — thank you. With love, always.
Read it again ↑Read Out Letters