After My Mother, My Teacher

By Sheikh Abdul Rashid
It is November 1957, and Albert Camus has just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The announcement is a month old, but the noise around it, the congratulations and interviews and photographers, has not quite died down. He sits at his desk and writes a letter. It is not addressed to a minister, a publisher or a critic. It goes to an old primary school teacher in Algiers, Monsieur Louis Germain.
One sentence from that letter has outlived the occasion: “When I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you.” Camus went on to say that without the affectionate hand held out to the poor child he had been, none of it would have happened, and that he did not make too much of this sort of honour. Think about that for a moment. He had just been handed the highest prize in literature, and what mattered to him was that someone had once kept him from falling. The letter later found its way into the last pages of The First Man, his unfinished novel, so a private thank-you became part of literature.
Who was that child? Camus was born in French Algeria in 1913. His father was killed in the First World War before the boy turned one. His mother was partly deaf and could not read, the family was desperately poor, and his grandmother ran the house with a heavy hand. In homes like that, books are not part of the furniture, and the idea of staying on at school is the sort of thing people think about and let go. But one teacher saw something in the boy. Germain gave him extra lessons, unpaid, so that he could sit the scholarship exam.
None of this was a plan. In a house where nobody had been that way before, a plan would have needed someone who had already seen the road. That is what a teacher can be for a child: the first person who has seen it.
Stay with that word “extra” for a moment. Teaching the syllabus is every teacher’s job, and most of them do it well. What makes a teacher great begins where the job ends: the hour after the bell, the glance that settles on the quiet child in the back row, the belief that nothing yet justifies. The best thing Germain did was never written on a blackboard. It was whatever did not make it into the register.
Today is 5 October. World Teachers’ Day has been observed every year since 1994, but few people know why it falls on this date. It is not the birthday of a poet or a philosopher. It marks a document: the 1966 recommendation on the status of teachers, adopted by the International Labour Organization and UNESCO. It set out standards for teachers’ rights and responsibilities, for their training, recruitment and employment, and for the conditions they work in. The first international standard the world set for teachers, in other words, was written not as a speech or a poem but as a list of rights and terms.
There is a point tucked away in that which we tend to forget. The international community never treated respect for teachers as something separate from their dignity, their training and their working conditions. And by UNESCO’s estimates the world still needs tens of millions more teachers to reach its education goals. A profession that is short by millions is saying something plain: in many classrooms right now, there is a Camus and no Germain.
If you are a student, this story holds one true thing for you and one responsibility. The true thing is that your background is not a verdict. A dead father, a poor home, a mother who could not read: all of it fell to Camus, and he still went on to the highest prize in literature. The responsibility is that the hand a teacher holds out does not carry you to the destination. It only shows you the road. Camus had to sit the scholarship exam himself. The pen was in his hand.
I have noticed that a teacher tends to give extra time to the student who knows how to ask for it. The one who stops and says, “I didn’t follow that.” Who doesn’t mind giving a half-right answer. Who doesn’t go quiet for fear of being wrong. Silence tells a teacher nothing about whether you need help, and a teacher has no window into your head. Your questions are the window.
This is not just sentiment. In 2014 Raj Chetty, John Friedman and Jonah Rockoff matched the records of well over a million students in a large American urban district with what happened to them later in life. Children who had more effective teachers were more likely to go to college and went on to earn more. A year in one classroom, it turns out, is not only that year. Its effects can still be there years afterwards. It is worth remembering on a bad Tuesday, when a lesson feels like nothing more than a lesson.
Now to the end of the story. When Germain received Camus’s letter he was delighted, and in a letter of his own he wrote that, however famous Camus had become, he would always be “my little Camus.” There is no professional pride in that line, only an attachment that outlasts the lessons by years. Most of us have a Germain, or had one. Someone who first made us feel we were more than a roll number. When did we last tell them so?
We often don’t write because we assume we should become something first and say thank you afterwards. Camus’s letter turns that around. Thanks is not a prize for success; it points back to where success started. Camus wrote after the Nobel. You don’t need a prize as an excuse. This week, write to one of your teachers, from school or madrasa or university, a letter or a message. Put one specific thing in it: on such a day you said this to me, and this is what it did. I think one specific line does more than ten lines of praise.
And if you are somewhere that decisions about a teacher’s salary, working conditions or standing rest with you, today asks for a different kind of thanks, the kind that comes with a receipt. The spirit of the 1966 document was that respect for a teacher cannot be separated from the rights and conditions that go with the job. Flowers last a day. A salary that arrives on time and a workplace that treats people decently last all year. A garland on the fifth is easy. A pay cheque on the thirtieth is the harder test.
And if you are a teacher yourself, there is something I want to say to you. You may never find out which of your sentences, which extra hour, became Germain’s hand for some child. Germain himself only heard it years later. So on the tired days, the hour you give someone is not wasted. Your receipt is still being written.
Germain did not hand Camus the Nobel Prize. He got a poor child as far as a scholarship exam, and the child walked the rest of the way. On paper a scholarship is a small thing, a form and an examination hall. It is how a boy from a house without books went on to write them. Look at the back row of your own classroom today. Look back at your own past. Somewhere there is an outstretched hand. Remember the name, and start paying the debt.