It was that moment for me – just like in the movies – when time freezes, your halo shines so bright that it almost blinds others, and your once nonexistent angel wings make you feel you are levitating. No matter how hard I traverse my mental landscape, I keep returning to that moment and so, it is that moment that I will describe here.

Back then, I was fairly new at Vista and was putting my hard-earned degree in Engineering to use by teaching Mathematics to Grade 7 students. You may not get the point yet, but you will once you know that I now teach English—after pursuing an even harder-earned Master’s in Literature. So, back to when I was teaching a spirited batch of wonderful children whose confidence in Math was still finding its footing. The chapter was Algebra, and I was trying to teach them how to find the value of the infamous ‘x’.

It was just my first teaching period, and my confidence in being a good teacher was already squashed. After successfully deriving the value of x in what seemed like an easy problem, I turned back to look at the children, only to find them staring at me as if I had just finished writing ancient hieroglyphs. And I’m not exaggerating – well, maybe just a tad – but I swear, I’m not too far off the mark!

While this may sound like the start of a disaster, things quickly turned around as my students and I began helping each other understand better. Cutting to the chase, my previously unenthusiastic bunch went ballistic over their scores in the next exam. If you’ve ever remotely taught anyone, you’d empathize with the feeling that unraveled in me as I looked at their happy faces. But ‘that’ moment – the one that became an epiphany of my calling, or a sturdy validation of my choice to become a teacher – came the next day when one of my students, who had never scored more than 50% in Math, told me she kept her exam paper under her pillow the previous night, just to keep touching it, in case her perfect score in Math was only a dream. That was my moment – frozen in time – when my halo shone bright, and I felt myself levitate on angel wings, crafted in the dreams of my students.

Author: Sri Ramya – Event Coordinator, Vista International School, Hyderabad