Reaching out

In the monotony of lockdown days, a contact from an old student of mine made my day. She was in the first group of philosophy students that I taught Classical Greek to at the University of Tehran. This was a large class of newly admitted students, and mine was the first lecture they were subjected to on their first day at college!

This must have been a traumatic experience for them: most of them had just come from the provinces to Tehran, stepped for the first time in the country’s oldest and most prestigious university, and were faced with a “foreign” lecturer who would introduce them to Classical Greek, beginning with a different alphabet!

She got in touch a few days ago to ask my help with the usage of some Greek conjunctions in Aristotle. She thought I would not remember who she was (after all, there were forty students in that class!). But I did remember her as an intelligent, keen face in the first row of the old-fashioned wooden benches, always on time, always ready to answer questions. She was in my class for a second semester, when we worked from Frank Beetham’s Learning Greek with Plato. That was six years ago.

 I opened Liddell-Scott, took images of the relevant pages and sent them off. She wrote back to say that she is forever bound to me for teaching her and making her love Greek. I cast my mind back at all the students I have taught over the years, in a high school in West London, at university in Tehran…at the hours we spent together, and the goodbyes, and those students who keep in touch and those who don’t. Like every teacher, I have given something of me and have taken something from each of them. This is what I miss most from my days of teaching. At times names and faces pop up in my thoughts without prompt, and I wonder what became of them all.

I wish them all well.

© Sofia A Koutlaki 2020