Every teacher who believed in us became a star in our sky -- lighting the path for us to one day shine for others.
In every student’s journey, there comes a time that demands emotional endurance alongside academic achievements: a transition when the world feels too fast, ambitions too vast, and the pathways ahead unbelievably uncertain.
For those of us who teach by day and learn by night, this phase can be particularly disorienting. We are expected to lead a classroom, to shape young minds, and yet, late at night, we sit before our own blank SOP draft, scattered research data, long-unchecked agendas, wondering if we still have the right to dream.
At first, everything appears orderly – every plan programmed by purpose, every goal mapped with precision. We begin our pursuit of research and international exposure with the aura of conviction, certain that hard work and structure will see us through.
However, as the days fold into one another, deadlines tighten their grip. What once felt structured begins to blur: the stumbling middles, the unfinished drafts, the anxious checklists of tomorrow, next month, or five years ahead--all converging into a haze that feels, in unison, messy and impossible.
It is an overwhelming journey--emotionally draining, financially rocky, and often clouded by self-doubt. Yet within that fog, something emerges in the guise of angels: the mentors. The ones who step softly into our chaos and hold the lantern steady when our own hands tremble.
True mentors do not just offer lofty words of advice and disappear until we get back to them. They stay, with patience, walking beside us as we rebuild ourselves, bit by bit, until we begin checking boxes we once feared unreachable. Weeks slip by, then months, and suddenly the impossible sets out to take shape. We achieve something: not the ultimate, perhaps, but enough to rise again, enough to believe again.
Great teachers are not discovered in classrooms; they are revealed in moments — in the pause before they say, “It’s all right, take your time, you can do it,” or “No worries, life is beautiful,” or in the reassuring reply to a late-evening email from a student adrift in a quagmire. It is in these gentle gestures– these unrecorded, unpraised instants—that teaching unveils its truest form.
And that’s the metamorphic miracle of mentorship: how some teachers guide us through chaos and carry our burdens as if they were their own. They become counsellor, guide, friend, philosopher — the only constant — all at once, just a call or a text away, despite their stature. The most remarkable part is the selflessness with which they do this: showing up without expectation, simply when it matters the most.
They teach us the craft of academia, and with equal devotion, the art of staying kind amid deadlines and fatigue. In their humility, they model the kind of teacher every profession needs. For it is the teacher who shapes every profession that follows; therefore, one must remain humane and kind before all else.
At different stages of life, teachers take many avatars--the one who first taught us letters; the one who stayed late to prepare us for high-stakes exams; the one who believed in us when our grades faltered; the one who guided us toward dreams of studying abroad; the one who nurtured our ethics, sparked our curiosity, reversed our distractions, and weaponised our potential; or the one who simply stood as a ‘parent figure’ in our most struggling years. Each leaves an imprint, and together, they initiate the version of ourselves we become.
Every word we speak in class, every gesture of positivity, every ounce of authority we wield is never simply ours; it is the distilled gift of those who once lifted us
The version of us that students later admire: standing at the dais, marker in hand, voice steady across a lecture hall—is only the gold dust glinting on the surface. Beneath it lies the real metal, forged in invisible hours of incertitude, molded by those who backed our backs in the trenches when we were still raw, skeptical, and afraid.
Every word we speak in class, every gesture of positivity, every ounce of authority we wield is never simply ours; it is the distilled gift of those who once lifted us. And so, when I stand in front of my own students now, I often hear myself echoing my mentors without even realising it.
In my early days of teaching, I bristled when students reached out beyond official hours — often with excuses that felt unconvincing — as I clung to the comfort of boundaries. But then I remembered someone who once saw potential in my confusion; had faith in my capacity to grow; believed in me when I stumbled, missed deadlines, or reached out in panic two days before a submission.
When I was just a bewildered student — lost between ambition and exhaustion; when my requests were rushed, my fears exaggerated; when everything felt overwhelming — and still, they stayed with me with unrelenting humanness, never bound by clocks or calendars, not even by weakness or weekends.
That belief left a mark. Gradually, I softened. I learned to listen more than I judged, to trust more than I tested. I stopped dismissing and started extending the same benefit of the doubt to my students. And, to my surprise, those who once leaned on excuses began to change in ways that surprised even them – simply because someone had chosen to trust them.
In that moment, I understood what it truly means to teach: that the hushed power of belief can do what no reprimand ever could. Perhaps this is the secret -- not solving every problem for a student, but creating the space in which belief can take root. From that space, the vast, terrifying landscape of uncertainty can be transformed into a series of small, achievable steps -- each one made possible by the patient faith of someone who has walked that path before.
Every Teacher’s Day, I return to one question: what does it truly mean to be a teacher? To me, it is empathy more than expertise — the ability to hear fear beneath excuses, to remain patient when progress is slow.
Teaching, at its core, is an act of faith: faith that kindness can kindle confidence, that belief can summon ability, and that a single moment of understanding can alter the course of a life. Because when a teacher chooses to believe in a student, the entire trajectory of that student’s future can shift.
So, on this Teacher’s Day, as I trace the arc of my own journey, I realise the most enduring lessons are not found in textbooks; rather, in mentors who chose to be human before anything else. Their existence reminds me that the shine my students see is not mine alone — it is their reflection shaping me, and through me, continuing to shape them.
The angels who carried us through our earliest vulnerabilities are the reason we rise. And if fortune favours, we, too, become stars in someone else’s constellation -- not out of duty, but out of gratitude to the universe and to the guardian angels who first lit our way. That -- the fine-drawn passing of faith from one heart to another -- is the true legacy of teachers: subtle, luminous, and endlessly unfolding.
* Fariha Nowrin is a teacher at the Department of English at the Canadian University of Bangladesh.