EFML: The girl with the glasses

Dear Reader, I want to take you on a walk down my memory lane today. Indulge me. Walk with me. Let me paint a picture for you with my words:)

Back when I was in school, I was the impossibly asocial combination of an introvert, an eccentric, a bookworm and a nerd. As I result, I ended up with less than a handful of friends. As the stereotype for a nerd goes, I used to be meticulous in my homework and disciplined and attentive in class. I also got reasonably good grades throughout, and needless to say, most teachers knew me or had heard of me, although I doubt many understood me. A convent school being what it is, my teachers never gave me more than the occasional understated word of encouragement or praise, on the other hand I never got any criticism. Never. Not once!

And then came 9th grade English. We were assigned a teacher who had never taught us before, I wasn't personally acquainted with her, although I'd seen her around. I wasn't very worried, owing to two things: One, she did not have an infamous reputation as a teacher. Two, English, along with Math, was one of my favorite subjects, and I was quite sure of the grip I had on the subject, due to my extensive and exhaustive activity of years as a bookworm. (We had English as our first language, and the collection of prose and poetry we had to study was really well curated, I must say. Not overtly complicated, but quite standard.)

The first class. She started off with a poem that was an English translation of one of Kuvempu's Kannada poems.

What is the soul? She asked of a class of 60 fourteen year olds, and looked around. No one volunteered to answer her. She looked in my general direction, and said 

You, the girl with the glasses.

Yours truly was like a deer caught in headlights. I wondered if she was actually asking me, and so I turned and looked behind. 

Why do you look behind, child? Aren't you wearing glasses? Answer me.

There was scattered laughter in the room, and I felt very conscious.

I stood up, and began: The soul is considered to be...

She rudely cut me off, and said:

I did not ask you what the soul is considered to be. I asked you what the soul is. You may remain standing for the rest of the class.

The color rushed to my cheeks, and I struggled to process this. A teacher had just asked me to stand for the entire class!? I felt like a criminal. But what had I done? And how ridiculous! Who knows what the soul really is? Is she really making me stand for this?

She did, and I stood, feeling ashamed. I was quite disturbed the entire day. My best friend consoled me: Don't worry. She doesn't know you yet. Once she does, she will realize how good you are at English. 

I nodded in agreement, and slowly I forgot this incident. The rest of my world was intact, and all other classes went on as usual.

Then came the next English class.We were reading a poem(Matthew Arnold perhaps, or Willam Blake, I struggle to recall) which began with a reference to a hound.

Girl with the glasses! What is the significance of the hound here?

This time, I didn't look around. But I truly could not answer. We were in the first line of the poem, and I had no clue what it was about yet. I'd need to read the whole thing first. I remained standing, and muttered a quiet, I don't know.

No prizes for guessing, I remained standing in that class too.

I went home, and that evening, I decided that I did not want to stand any more in class. For the first time in my life, I decided to study beforehand, prior to the class, so that her questioning would not catch me off guard. I went prepared the next time.

We were reading an essay on social satire, and she picked on me to read.

You! The girl with the glasses! Start reading please.

 I stood up, lifted my textbook and confidently began reading. I'd read this before, and it was easy. I barely finished one sentence, when she cut me off.

You don't pronounce it as civilization, it's civilization. You may remain standing.

I was aghast, this wasn't even a real mistake! I had used the British pronunciation and she was using the American. Despite knowing this, I remained standing, silent and nearly in tears, because the very same Convent education taught me not to question my teacher. 

By now, I could feel the disdain of so many people, who had been tired of the goody-two-shoes student that I had been for a decade. They mocked me, albeit subtly. Not only that, but this teacher was also nice to everyone else in class and no one felt she was unfair. 

For the first time, I questioned my own abilities and wondered if she were right. 

Because I always read from books, my pronunciation wasn't up to the mark--I could spell and write and use complicated words in conversation accurately, but I'd never actually heard people say them.

I'd always loved reading poems, but honestly, I wasn't so great at interpreting them.

I didn't seriously contemplate on the alternate, which was that she somehow hated just me at sight, and wanted to make my life miserable. It was easier to agree with her and blame myself.

Looking back, I'm sure this was my impostor syndrome coming to the forefront, but I didn't know all that back then. I concluded that I wasn't so great at English after all. Maybe the other teachers were biased because of what they'd heard about me. This one was being honest.

I tried to work harder, but the result was always the same. My answers never satisfied my teacher, and this persisted in the first few tests we had as well. What I thought were eloquent essays with apt metaphors went unnoticed, and so did every single answer on my paper, at least all the subjective ones. She did not grade me badly, but I was no longer in the 'excellent' category. I was merely 'above average'. Oh,the horror of her classes! English was one of the lectures I used to look forward to so much before, and now it had morphed into trepidation and anxiety. I just hated the class. 

My friend still tried to convince me that the teacher was unfair to me, and swore that she hated her for being so mean to me. But I brushed off her words as being more due to solidarity than sincerity, and remained despondent. Nothing changed. She still picked on me, and I was always 'girl with the glasses'. Was I so insignificant that she couldn't bother learning my name? I wondered. I never stopped answering her questions in class though. Maybe it was a small sign of my rebellion, a tiny part of my spirit that just refused to give up.

Somewhere after the middle of the academic year, on an otherwise normal day, this lady picked me to answer a question for the zillionth time. 

Yes, that's correct.

I was so shocked I almost forgot to sit down :D. And then, things suddenly started looking up for me. She started accepting my answers in class, and my test scores were back to being near perfect. I couldn't believe it- this must be a Christmas miracle! My few friends were absolutely delighted for me, and the rest of the class quickly forgot my tryst with infamy and started treating me the same again. By the end of the year, she even got to praising me in front of the entire class. I really did not know what changed, but I was glad it did. 

It's been a whole decade since then, and this is no longer important to me, in fact, it seems like a trifle now. But I have never been able to forget this entire set of incidents, because I clearly remember feeling that self-doubt. Wondering if I was good enough, feeling so keenly that I wasn't. It was so easy to believe in someone else's opinion of me, and so difficult to persist in my own irrespective of that. 

Want to know the weirdest part? I don't even hate her, sometimes I think of her with a little fondness. She got me to up my game, and I definitely owe some of my fancy pronunciations and accents to her.

Whenever life batters me too hard and I feel that it's unfair, I think of that English teacher of mine. I hope that if I show up enough times to the battlefield, one day, life will get tired and smile at me instead, just like she did. I dream that one day, long after, I'll look back fondly and muse over how much it taught me. 

Dear Reader, I wish that you find the conviction to believe in yourself when life questions your abilities. I hope that you find the strength to fight your battles long after the point where you think there's no hope. If you can do these two things consistently and persistently, life will always have a soft spot for you and eventually smile at you. :)