I Do It For You
As I embark on this teaching journey, I can’t help but be flooded with emotions. Excitement about meeting my students, nervousness for the same reason, anxieties about keeping everyone safe during COVID, coupled with the trepidation of being a first year teacher. Of course, I’m also inclined to look back on the people and the compulsions that have brought me here. No one more so than my eighth grade language arts teacher, Ms. Rani Chandran.
Before I was a student in her class, I never much cared for English class. I didn’t feel like I was particularly good at it, not did I feel like I had much to say about the texts we read. Her impact wasn’t simply that she believed in me and encouraged me endlessly. Rather, she really saw me — detecting a voice in me that had been neither nurtured nor encouraged. She instilled in me that writing and research can be about anything under the sun; under her direction, I wrote a research paper about modern day wiccan practices and witchcraft (yea, I was a weird kid). That paper ended up winning second place in a school wide writing contest.
Through Rani, I also learned at a precious young age about loss. I remember, before we parted ways for the summer, promising to go back and visit her as a high school student. Alas, it was a promise I wasn’t meant to keep, as she (along with her son) was killed in a tragic car accident just days after my middle school graduation. I couldn’t understand how life could’ve dealt such a wonderful person such a tragic hand. It was an early lesson about the precarity of life and irreparable loss.
It seems glib to say that Rani changed my life; I’m sure she did that for many. But, importantly, she helped me realize the capacity of language and of stories to express myself, to find myself. I wish I could’ve gone back to visit her — to share stories of my triumphs and growth in high school and to complain about my English teachers, who only assigned texts by white authors. And I SO wish I could’ve thanked her for the profound impact she had on my life. I have no doubt that she is the reason I am an educator today. I aim to be that same effervescent light for my students that she was for me, while knowing when to gently challenge my students in order for them to grow.
It’s been 15 years since her passing. I struggle to comprehend this rapid ascent of time — it’s been half a lifetime since she left an indelible impression on me. And yet, memory is a fickle thing. The traces of her existence are ephemeral in both physical and digital archives, save a yearbook photo here, a blog post by a former student there. For so long, I conflated her physical representation with my emotional remembrance of her; I was surprised to revisit this rather deadpan yearbook staff photo. But my heart will always remember her as a reliably comforting and nurturing presence, there for me when I needed her.
I guess Ms. Maya Angelou was right all along: “People may forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.” I certainly won’t. I hope I make you proud, Ms. Rani Chandran.
