Dear Students,
On Thursday last week, a mother sat across from me and placed a stack of letters on my desk. Eighty of them. Written by her daughter, a child who left GGIS for a school a few kilometres away 2 years ago.
Eighty letters, written to her own parents, asking to come back to GGIS.
I read a few of them with the mother watching me, and I will admit it, I had a happy tear.
Every letter mentioned the same things.
Not the building.
Not the brand.
Not a single word about rankings or results.
She simply wrote about the love she got from her teachers here.
The care. The attention. The fun in her class, in sports, in art, in library sessions. The love and encouragement.
She wrote about two teachers by name, and she drew their faces from memory, the way children only draw the people who made them feel safe.
And then she said something I will carry with me for a long time. The mother did not thank us for the syllabus or the boards or the labs.
She thanked us, specifically, for how we stood by the difficult kids. The loud ones. The disrespectful ones. With the same level of kindness we give everyone else.
I want to sit with that for a moment, because I think we underestimate what it costs to do this well.
It is easy to be warm to the child who is easy to love.
But it takes something else entirely to hold that same warmth for the child who tests you, who talks back, who makes your Tuesday harder than it needed to be.
That child is watching too. That child remembers too.
Apparently, she remembers enough to draw your face from another school, a year later, and beg her parents to bring her back to you.
To every teacher who has ever cared enough, thank you.
A child chose to immortalise you in crayon over every other adult in her life outside her own home. That is not a small thing.
And to every teacher who has ever stayed patient with a child who was not making it easy for you, this letter is proof that it mattered.
It was seen. It was remembered. And somewhere a few kilometres away, it just brought a family back home.
