Oddly enough, my favorite teacher is not from primary or secondary school but from university. His name is Antonio Augusto but he likes to be called by his nickname, Guto. Curiously, I've never attended one of his classes prior to becoming his supervisee. At that time, I was beginning the last year of my undergrad and needed to complete a dissertation but none of the subjects I've previously studied attracted me enough to do a deeper research. However, I've heard about a subject called “Philosophy of Science” and I knew that a guy named Heisenberg, a German quantum physicist, had once said something like “The part is greater than the whole”, and this really caught my attention. After all, philosophers are allowed to make baffling remarks such as this one, but not scientists; at least that was what I thought back then! And it happens that Guto is a lead expert in Heisenberg. One day I approached him in the corridor and asked if he would be willing to supervise my dissertation. He agreed to supervise me but not on Heisenberg, since he was already working with another grad student on the same topic. He suggested working with a French scientist named Poincaré and I accepted.

The reason I consider Guto to be my favorite teacher is because he challenged me intellectually and he believed in my potential. I eventually finished my dissertation and I thoroughly enjoyed this new field of study. So much so that I decided to continue studying it for my Master’s. Guto told me that it would be expected from me to know French if I wanted to deepen my studies in Poincaré, and asked me “Translate this French text”. I completely panicked. I’ve never studied French in my life and here is Guto, casually asking me to do it as if he was asking me to pass the butter. At the same time as it looked to be an insurmountable challenge, it also sounded like a vote of confidence, as if he believed I could do it. Nonetheless, it took me two years to believe in myself. It took me two years to sit down and translate that text. But it was through that text that Guto so nonchalantly asked me to translate that I started learning a new language. That challenge took me to France one year later and, by then, I was able to read Poincaré's own words. Today I know four more languages, but a lot can be traced back to that moment when Guto suggested I could do something that I had no idea I could possibly achieve.

As you have probably noticed by now, my learning development happened later in life. It's not that I wasn't good or interested in school but, back then, learning didn't really get my full attention. It was only at university, when I was finally given some choice of what to study, that I was able to start flourishing. And now I'm a teacher.  I have to keep reminding myself, as frustrating as it can be, that perhaps a student´s time hasn't come yet, that they will be able to flourish with another teacher, at a later stage, etc. But there are some things that I do now that perhaps would have helped younger me to develop earlier: I allow as much choice as possible in what I teach, I encourage students to pursue their curiosity and I challenge them to do things they're not used to. I try to be to my students what Guto was to me: “Yes, you’ll write a Hollywood movie script about the Industrial Revolution”.

Andre Philot
Social Studies teacher at Colegio Interamericano, Guatemala.