Not Model Students, Just Human Ones

I went back to college last week, and I will honestly admit I was nervous about it.

Warden had called me and a few fellow Thomians back to address the teaching staff. A frightening prospect, mostly because none of us sitting there could honestly be called model students. So I did the only thing that made sense. I kept it real.

I admitted to the antics we got up to growing up. I admitted, just as honestly, to the very real mess of navigating a school full of testosterone fuelled teenage boys. And I told them, without dressing it up, how our teachers helped shape us into young men anyway, regardless of what marks we scraped through with.

One question from that room has stayed with me since. A relatively young teacher asked, so Vidusha, are you telling me all the teachers of your time were role models? If not, what did you wish you had seen in them that was missing?

It is a fair question, and I think teachers are handed an unfair expectation because of it. We seem to want every teacher to be a perfect role model, all the time, to every child. I told the room the truth instead. There were teachers we loved. There were teachers we could not stand. There were teachers we barely noticed either way. Every student’s experience of the same staffroom is genuinely different.

But across all of it, two things held true for me personally.

I was never made to feel like a nobody, and I was never made to feel unwanted. And I was always given opportunities to make something of myself.

That was it. That was genuinely all I needed.

Which brought me to the harder part of what I said that day. As much as we hold teachers accountable, we need to hold ourselves as parents just as accountable. It is fair to expect a school to help mould a child. It is not fair to expect a school to carry the ultimate responsibility for who that child becomes. That weight belongs to us, as parents, first.

All a teacher can really do, all a teacher should be expected to do, is make sure a child feels loved, feels nurtured, and is handed real opportunities. What a child does with those opportunities depends on the child, and on the parenting sitting underneath the school years, far more than we like to admit.

We also forget, too easily, that teachers are human. They carry the same families, the same financial pressure, the same exhaustion we all do. And yet we expect them to hold a higher ideal, a higher responsibility, a higher standard than the rest of us. Most of them meet it, admirably. The ones who struggle need the same thing any of us would, help, support, and mentorship, and I hope we keep offering it rather than simply judging from the outside.

Because if teachers get this right, what we get in return is not just educated children. We get young men and women of actual character. Not educated idiots.

A big thank you to Warden for the invitation. And a genuine joy, walking into that room and finding teachers who once taught me, now also teaching my son.

Everything teaches. Not everyone learns. But a child who never once felt like a nobody usually does.