One lesson, in two forms, from five teachers.

I was catching up with a dear friend a few days ago. Let’s call her Melanie.

Melanie and I were together in graduate school at MIT. Our studies had focused on mathematical modelling in management; she was getting her master’s degree, and I stayed on to do a Ph.D.

“I was on the MIT campus a month ago,” I remarked. “It brought back fond memories!”

Melanie smiled and nodded.

“I met up with so-and-so. He sold his business, and he’s now a professor there, and doing so well.”

“That’s so great to hear!” Melanie replied.

We started talking about our time at MIT. Our classmates, and teachers. At one point, I reminisced about a professor – let’s call him Don.

“Oh,” Melanie shrugged. “He wasn’t one of the professors I admired there.”

Don had a quirky personality, and I imagined that didn’t gel well with Melanie. I started talking about the new buildings that had come up on the MIT campus.

But something was gnawing at me inside. Go back to her remark about Don. There’s something there.

“Melanie,” I said, reversing gears, “by the way, what was it about Don that made you not like him?”

She paused. I held my breath.

“One time, during our first semester, I was going to take a class with him. On the second day, I went up to him to ask a question about the homework assignment he had given us. It involved a mathematical structure I had not learned in college. I asked him if this was something he would teach before the homework was due.

“He just looked at me and said, ‘If you don’t know this, you don’t belong here.’

“Can you believe it? He told me I didn’t belong there! I had no idea that this class required an advanced prerequisite. I had simply not taken that class in college.”

“Oh, that is terrible,” I interjected.

A part of me always seeks to look for the best in human nature. “You think, just maybe, that he meant you didn’t belong in this class, and that’s it?”

“No,” remarked Melanie, emphatically. “It was quite clear. He was telling me I didn’t belong at MIT.”

I sighed.

And here is the part that will make me never forget this moment.

Melanie started to choke up. Her eyes were teary. She looked at me and said, “I’m sorry! I still feel it so much. I shouldn’t be like this, but it still makes me so hurt when I think of what he said to me that day, early in my time in graduate school.”

“Melanie, listen,” I offered, seeking to re-ground her. “That was a very poor way for him to act. You know and everyone knows just how remarkable you are.”

Melanie gave me a half-smile, and nodded.

Let me tell you about the woman who was sitting across from me. Melanie performed very well at MIT. She went on to build mathematical models in finance, and did very well professionally, earning big bonuses for her innovative models and the financial returns they generated for investors. This allowed her to put enough money in the bank to never have to work for money again, all by the time she was 32. She then quit to get a PhD in psychology and pursue her passions for writing, women’s rights and teaching. She married, raised a family, and continues to thrive.

Three decades of evidence, on one side of the scale. On the other side, one sentence, spoken in passing by a professor who likely does not even remember saying it.

On days like this, the sentence was still winning.

Since our meeting, I’ve asked myself. What statements might I have made to my students in passing that may have stuck with them, for years to come? Have other students’ lives been quietly affected as well, by one thing a teacher once said to them? So I went looking for other sentences, spoken just as casually, by other teachers, to other students. The first one I found was said to a boy whose teachers had given up on him.

If You Ever Do Get Out of Here

Henry Winkler’s parents fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and settled in New York. Henry could not spell, could not do math, and could hardly read. His teachers concluded he was lazy. At home, his parents had a nickname for him: dummer Hund, meaning dumb dog.

He failed geometry three times, then passed with a D-minus. He loved drama, but was not allowed in the school plays because his grades were too low. He applied to twenty-eight colleges and was accepted by one. Lying in bed at night as a boy in New York City, he later recalled, he would think, I’m not achieving in anything. All I want to do is be somebody.

He did become somebody. As Fonzie in Happy Days, Henry Winkler became one of the most recognizable faces in America. When he was thirty-one, his stepson was tested and found to be dyslexic, and that is when Winkler learned that everything they said about his stepson was true of him.

Back when he was in school, Donald Rock was the head of music there. Winkler has said that in his entire time at school, this is the one sentence he remembers. Mr. Rock once told him:

“Winkler, if you ever do get out of here, you’re going to be okay.”

One sentence, in passing.

Later in his life, Winkler reflected, “I kept that one sentence in my heart.”

Winkler went on to co-write a series of children’s books about a boy with dyslexia. When the books became a television show, there was a kind music teacher in it named Mr. Rock. The man who played him was Henry Winkler.

Whatever Happens

The second sentence I found was spoken in a hallway, to a boy who was already halfway out the door.

Walter Dean Myers grew up in Harlem in the 1940s with a speech impediment so severe that the other boys teased him without mercy, and he answered them with his fists.

What saved him from himself was reading. He would check out books from the library and carry them home hidden in brown paper bags, so the boys would not see.

He was bright enough to get into Stuyvesant, one of New York’s elite public high schools. And then he began to come apart. He skipped school for weeks at a time, forging his mother’s signature. His family had no money for college. He could see no path from where he stood to where he wanted to go. He was, by his own account, walking away from the system while wishing he could find a way in.

One day, sitting outside the guidance counselor’s office, he was spotted by his English teacher. She had noticed his writing, and she had noticed, too, that he was probably not going to last. She stopped and said one thing to him:

“Whatever happens, don’t stop writing.”

He did not really understand what she meant. He dropped out, and on his seventeenth birthday, joined the army. After that came years of menial jobs, and a depression.

And then one day, working a construction job, her sentence came back to him. Whatever happens, don’t stop writing. He began to write at night, after the day’s labor. He wrote about the hardest years of his life, his teenage years in Harlem, and he found that other young people needed those stories the way he had once needed the books in the brown paper bags.

Walter Dean Myers went on to publish more than seventy books, to win nearly every major award in children’s literature, and to serve as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.

Three Blind Mice

The third sentence was spoken to a child who had stopped speaking altogether.

Juan Felipe Herrera was born in a small town near Fresno, California, to parents who followed the crops from farm to farm.

School, when it came, was a place where he wasn’t allowed to speak in Spanish. He was hit with a ruler and told to speak English. And so he went, in his words, from being a Spanish speaker, to an almost-English speaker, to a non-speaker. Silence.

His third-grade teacher, Mrs. Sampson, played gospel music in class on an old phonograph. One day she turned to the silent boy in the back and said, “John, come on up and stand in front of the class. I want you to sing a song.”

He was stunned. No one had ever called him to the front of a class. He could not speak in class, and now he was being asked to sing in front of it. But her tone, he remembers, was an invitation. And she said, I’m right here next to you.

So he walked to the front of the room, turned to face his first audience, and sang “Three Blind Mice.” He made it all the way through.

And then Mrs. Sampson said to him: “You have a beautiful voice.”

It blew him to pieces. He did not know what she meant. He did not want to accept it. He went back to his seat, turning the words over. Beautiful voice. I don’t have a beautiful voice. Beautiful voice. Those words, he later reflected, became his lifelong puzzle and his golden key. Little by little, over a whole life, he worked at unlocking them.

In 2015, at sixty-six, Juan Felipe Herrera was named Poet Laureate of the United States. A few years later, an elementary school in Fresno opened its doors bearing his name, and he came to address the children on their first day. He gave them what he called a five-word magic message. He asked them to take it to heart, and to believe it was true from that day on:

“You have a beautiful voice.”

What We See, and What We Don’t See

Not one of these teachers said anything about a grade, a test, or a skill. You’re going to be okay. Don’t stop writing. You have a beautiful voice. Each one was aimed at something the teacher could see underneath the student’s current understanding of things, and the student could not yet see at all.

A sentence addressed to someone’s soul has a different half-life than a sentence addressed to their homework. It does not fade. It waits. It becomes a thing kept in the heart for sixty years, until one day the person it was given to is standing in front of a school that bears their name, giving it away.

Every one of these teachers spoke almost by accident. It does not have to be left to accident.

This is Who You Really Are

Tetsuko Kuroyanagi has been, by many measures, the most beloved television personality in the history of Japan, and the first person from Asia to serve as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. But she began her education by being expelled from first grade. She was too restless, too curious, forever at the window calling out to the street musicians. Her mother was told the girl was disrupting the whole class.

So her mother found her a strange little school called Tomoe, where the classrooms were old railway cars, and where the headmaster, Sosaku Kobayashi, had spent years studying how children grow. On her first day, he listened to the little girl talk for four hours. And in the years that followed, he kept saying one thing to her, over and over:

“You’re really a good girl, you know.”

In her memoir, written in her late forties, Kuroyanagi says she cannot measure how much she has been sustained by those words. Had she never met Mr. Kobayashi, she writes, she would probably have been labeled a bad girl, and grown up confused and burdened by it.

The Gardener

In his late sixties, Henry Winkler wrote that he still did not know why Mr. Rock chose to make that remark to him all those years ago, but that it “planted a seed that grows within me to this day”.

How little each of these teachers could have seen of the future, when they planted the seed. Mr. Rock did not tell Henry Winkler what he was good at, only that he would somehow be okay. Walter Dean Myers’s teacher had read his stories; she asked him only to keep going. Mrs. Sampson named a gift that was not even there, for whatever she heard in “Three Blind Mice,” it was not a singer’s voice. And yet, it was the truest thing anyone ever said to Juan, for the voice was a poet’s, and it would take him decades to find it.

This is what I have come to understand from Melanie’s tears. We are all of us sowing seeds, every day, and mostly blind. The speaker forgets. The listener carries. Don was sowing too, on the second day of that class when he spoke that way to Melanie, and he has no idea what grew.

We can choose to go beyond the performance in front of us to speak to the soul that lies in waiting, underneath. We can say the sentence that will still be true in thirty years, and say it while it can still do its work. And we can sow such seeds not once, by happenstance, but again and again, like Mr. Kobayashi was doing.

So whatever you say, and to whomever you say it, know that you may be planting something that will keep pulling them down for the rest of their life, or keep lifting them up.

Here is my question for you.

What one sentence will you offer someone today that may awaken them, years from now, to the gifts of their soul?

With gratitude for the teachers who saw us before we could,
Hitendra

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