Saima Khalil
He sat at the back of my classroom and said almost nothing. Not because he had nothing to say, but because no one around him spoke his language.
The boy had come to Peshawar from Bajaur, carried along by a family forced to migrate under difficult circumstances. His parents visited school after school before finally admitting him to ours, an English-medium institution that, on paper, promised him a better future. For the child, however, it opened the door to a world he could not understand a single word of.
He had previously studied in an Urdu-medium school. Now, surrounded by classmates who moved easily through English lessons, he could barely follow what his teachers were saying. He struggled with classwork, could not answer questions, and found it difficult to keep pace with tests and activities.
He grew quieter by the week.
Some of my colleagues were understandably concerned. How could a child who did not understand English survive in an English-medium classroom? There was frustration, too, about why he had been admitted when teachers were expected to teach entirely in a language he could not understand.
But while everyone else was watching his performance, I found myself asking a different question: What if his poor performance had nothing to do with his ability?
As his class teacher, I began going to his desk and explaining lessons to him in Urdu, assuming that would bridge the gap. It didn’t. Slowly, I realized something no one had considered. He wasn’t fully comfortable in Urdu either.
He was a Pashto-speaking child, caught between two languages and a completely unfamiliar classroom environment.
So I switched quietly, almost in a whisper beside his desk, to Pashto. I kept it discreet so that I would not single him out in front of classmates who might tease him for being different. While the others worked independently, I would go over to him and walk him through the task. During the last few minutes of an activity, I made sure he understood what was actually being asked of him.
At first, he barely responded. But slowly, something began to change.
He started trusting me. He began asking questions instead of retreating into silence. Whenever he was lost, he would glance toward me.
I realized that before I could teach him English, I first had to teach him not to be afraid of being wrong.
I told him repeatedly that there was nothing shameful about a wrong answer. I encouraged him to respond, even if only in Urdu. Whenever he gave even a partially correct answer, I made sure the class heard that his effort mattered.
Little by little, the boy who once sat in silence began raising his hand. Then he started answering. He answered in Urdu, with growing confidence. And eventually, he began speaking English.
Over the following six to eight months, something remarkable happened. The child who once cried at home and resisted coming to school began to enjoy it. He became interested in his lessons, participated in class, and grew more confident. His grades improved as his confidence grew.
By the end of the year, he had achieved a strong academic result.
The change surprised not only me but also the teachers who had once doubted him. The child many had quietly written off as unlikely to succeed had shown that his ability had never been the problem. The barriers were language, confidence and fear—three things no test score can measure.
His parents noticed the change, too. They would come to school simply to thank me. They told me their son had become more confident, was communicating comfortably in Urdu, was picking up English and was steadily improving.
But it was the boy’s own words that stayed with me longest. He told someone that he liked his class teacher because “she understands him and cooperates with him.”
That was perhaps the greatest reward I have ever received as a teacher.
This experience reshaped the way I see children in my classroom. We are often quick to judge students by their marks, homework and ability to speak up. A silent child is labeled weak. A struggling child is considered less capable. A child who cannot speak the language of instruction is assumed to be academically behind.
But what if we are looking at it backwards?
Perhaps the child isn’t weak at all. Perhaps he is simply waiting for someone to understand him.
As teachers, we can become so absorbed in syllabi, tests and results that we sometimes forget the human being sitting in front of us. Education is not only about transferring knowledge. It is also about building confidence, creating belonging and giving a child the courage to try, fail and try again.
That boy from Bajaur taught me something I will carry throughout my career: a few minutes of individual attention can alter the course of a child’s life.
We don’t always need hours. Sometimes five minutes are enough—to sit beside a struggling child, explain something in a way he can understand, listen to him, and say: “It’s all right if your answer is wrong. Try again.”
Sometimes those five minutes become the beginning of an entirely different story.
The boy who once cried at the thought of school eventually walked into it with his head held high. The student who once could not answer a single question eventually answered in English. The child who once felt like an outsider eventually felt that he belonged.
And perhaps that is the quiet truth at the heart of teaching: a teacher may believe she is only delivering a lesson. Sometimes, without realizing it, she is rewriting a child’s entire story.
