Teachers

I had a teacher once, whose name was Mr. Amershadian. He couldn't have been more than five and a half feet tall, and he was round, pudgy, with a grey beard and moustache. Outside of class, I called him "Uncle Peter," due to the fact that he had been good friends with my grandmother for decades. He was gay, liked trains, spoke twelve different languages and in a way he vaguely reminded me of a fuzzy teddy bear; he was without a doubt the most intimidating and frightening teacher I have ever met. This wasn't because he was mean or terrible. It's just that everyone who crossed his path adopted an intense need to make him proud, and that is a very intimidating task. He was tough, but only because he knew when you weren't working as hard as you should be. And he was always, always right. "In five years, you'll thank me for being such a tough teacher," he would often tell us when a student was on the verge of tears. I was in France recently, and my accent was good enough so that nobody could recognize I was not a native speaker. I was tempted to write him an email, telling him, but then I realized that he was, as usual, absolutely right. And there's a part of me that doesn't want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that he was right.