Witnessing the Flowers Bloom
Hello everyone! My name is Shumaila Baig, and I have been joyfully attached to the teaching profession for the past eleven years. Over the years, I’ve discovered that a teacher’s job description could fill a book—though none of it is in the official contract! We are lesson planners, storytellers, crowd managers, stage decorators, event photographers, tech trouble-shooters, band-aid appliers, and occasionally even detectives searching for missing lunchboxes.
Yet, amidst all this delightful chaos, there’s a special kind of magic in seeing students grasp something new. It’s in those moments you realize that the seeds of knowledge you’ve planted are now growing on their own.
A heart-warming memory I still treasure takes me back four or five years. In grade 1, I had a student from a humble Pashtun family. His mother, though not formally educated, was deeply concerned about his studies. One day, he anxiously asked me if I had seen his English book. “I hadn’t”, I replied. The next day, he returned looking even more distressed, I looked into the cupboards but didn’t find it. On the third day, he quietly handed me his diary. Inside was a note he had written, all by himself and made his mother signed it:
Dear teacher,
Soban cannot find his English book at home. Please help him.
Soban’s Mom
I cannot describe the joy that note gave me. For a moment, I wanted to dedicate my own English book to him! I forgot the tension of the “missing book mystery” and simply basked in the realization that another little bird had spread his wings. Without any formal help from home, he had managed to express himself in a new language. And the interesting thing was that he came to know that how he can report it “through proper channel”. He had found his voice—the voice of awareness, of independence, of possibility.
And that is what teaching truly is—a journey filled with small but power-packed moments that remind us why we do what we do. These little sparks of brilliance keep us teachers going. Because at the end of the day, the joy of seeing a child’s growth outweighs every ounce of exhaustion.