The teacher — who pointed me to the beauty of English.

A teacher is never a giver of truth; he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for
himself.
- Bruce Lee

As Bruce Lee said, the teacher doesn’t feed us the Truth. She points us to the direction, she shows the
path for us and makes us realize the truth for ourselves for our own upliftment.

I was fortunate enough to encounter one such teacher in my course of life. Days go back to my high
school where I weighed my beliefs as the ultimate truth. All credits to my limited awareness, knowledge,
and maturity.

One fine June morning during my 9th, my teacher came in the 3rd hour & introduced us that she will be
handling the English language for two years (9th & 10th). Little did I know, it would turn out to be a turning
point in my life.

She was a tough teacher who always emphasized discipline & neatness to us. I wasn’t a fan of English; I
just spoke, read and studied just like anyone else in the school. Until I witnessed her unconventional,
radical and better way of English teaching.

Slowly my perception towards English started to change. I started to see the other side and wonder —
why hadn’t I saw this till now. It took it a few days for me to realize that all these changes were a direct
result of my teacher’s approach to making me taste the beauty of English.

I started to crave for her classes more. Her classes always got over in a blink of an eye for me as I would
totally get immersed in the flow of it. The important change she brought in most of the students like me in
her class was — making us understand the potential of a language. She always said: "Language was
invented by man for his need to communicate. Slowly, it became a medium to create stories, a barrel to
store our histories, a boat to sail our gossips and to build literary worlds". This profoundly impacted us: of
how a language (symbols & sounds) could be used in so many ways to uplift humanity.

All her grammar classes are still so vivid & fresh in my memory. One of the profound memories was —
the sentence she took as an example (Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow) to explain
clauses to us. Where she went on to say: " ‘Mary had a little lamb’ can stand as an independent
sentence, thus, it is an independent clause & the rest ‘whose fleece was white as snow’ doesn't make any
sense and had to depend on Mary... sentence to make sense, so, it is a dependent clause. Whenever she
used to ask for the meaning of a few words, there were a bunch of my classmates who already had
become masters looking up the meaning of the words swiftly in the Oxford Dictionary — to impress her.
When my classmates read out exactly the way it is in the dictionary, she used to discard it & ask them to
understand, paraphrase the meaning in their own words & then use them in a sentence. This exercise
would permanently etch the meaning of the word in our memory. I can go on & on … on her teaching
style which still haunts me in innumerable ways.

Ultimately, the biggest gift she gave to me was seeding the love for English, more than anything else !
Pointing me to embrace its beauty. Because just by unconditionally loving & sensing the beauty of
language, it bounds back to us a thousandfold times. This has come true to me in every sense. She
always told “The more you use the language, the more it is yours… For instilling the growth mindset &
love of English. I always stand in the shadow of your debt and gratitude. Thank you, Pamela Benny
Ma'am!