Robina — My Unsung Hero
I never really understood what people mean when they say, “it takes a village to raise a child”. What does the village do? How can one trust the village to do the right thing? Who is part of this village?
This is because I didn’t experience the nurturing relationships a “village” is supposed to offer as my parents worked full-time in the city and struggled with raising children away from their families. The environment I saw around me was uncertain and the frequent change or absence of house help made everyday life unpredictable.
It was a time when communication with children was not considered as an important part of upbringing. Children were supposed to follow what the elders commanded and expressing dissent was considered disrespectful. I don’t remember any significant conversations with any of the adults in my family before the age of eighteen. The commonly asked questions to children included “konsi class main ho?” (Which grade are you in?) and “baray ho kar kya bano gi” (what do you want to be when you grow up), the right answer to which was expected to be a “doctor” if you are were a girl. The boys however, could choose between a doctor, an engineer or a pilot. It was probably because cultivating meaningful relationships with children wasn’t perceived pivotal to their mental growth.
Things weren’t too different at school either, where the administrations’ and hence teachers’ priority was mostly to maintain discipline rather than nurturing the children. Teachers were not trained to engage with the students. There was no check and balance or accountability for the teachers’ behavior in the classrooms. Corporal punishment was common, and teachers often let their own traumas out on the students.
There are two incidents which are particularly etched in my mind .
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At my first school, we had a uniform which included the traditional shalwar & qameez for girls until grade 2. However, from grade 3, a stole was mandatory to be worn over the qameez (shirt). I reckon the physical changes girls experience around that age and the shame surrounding it were supposed to be concealed with the stole. However, my seven-year-old mind was too young to be able to understand and carry the burden of this shame.
As I moved to grade three, our household circumstances got increasingly difficult due to the uphill struggle my mother experienced owing to a full-time job, raising a newborn, and taking care of all the children by herself. She couldn’t manage to give full attention to everyone which resulted in partial neglect and inability to follow up on our daily homework and demands from school. As a result, we often faced anger from our teachers for not having all the notebooks ready or for not having the homework done.
On the first day of grade 3, I arrived at school without a stole over my shirt. Being a seven-year-old, I was not able to stitch it myself and my mother had other, more important challenges on her hand, such as being able to continue working, despite having uncertainty around house help and an infant which required constant attention.
One of the teachers in the school had responsibility to monitor shoes and uniforms and to ensure students complied to the dress code. I remember her face very vividly which always had a strange terrifying expression. Students were so afraid of her that they would often avoid the path if they saw her coming, due to the fear of her uncalled-for yelling at anyone she alleged to be breaking the disciplinary code. That morning when she came to my class for the routine round and started going to all desks one by one, checking everyone’s shoes and uniforms, I started shivering with fear, anticipating her rudeness due to the missing stole. It wasn’t intentional that I didn’t have it on, rather it was due to my mother not being able to take out the time to go buy the cloth, give it to tailor and collect it for me. I still remember that I was sitting at the last desk of the corner row, which I chose carefully hoping that she might skip the last benches or might forget to check the stoles. Not only was my strategy futile, but it also backfired because by the time she reached my desk, her anger had escalated.
She looked at my shirt, threw her dupatta at me and smirked. Then she exclaimed in a very accusatory tone “I know why you don’t wear the stole (patti)” and glanced at the boys in the room. Being a seven-year-old, I could hardly fathom the meaning of her tone or accusatory look or the words, but was mortified by the whole situation. Deep down, I knew she was misjudging me, but I never tried to explain myself while her loud noise was roaring through the roof. A few years later when I remembered that instance, I understood the sheer ugliness of her disgraceful implication.
This instance traumatized me so much that I hated going to school and stopped soon after. My parents decided to change our school in the middle of school term, and I felt a sudden sense of relief, as if I could breathe again. The suffocation I felt, and the suffering experienced at that school got pushed in the background.
***
Another incident that often haunts me is from grade 5 when a new teacher was assigned to the class, let’s call her Miss X. A memorable detail which comes to my mind regarding her persona is that she often had an infection in her throat and coughed incessantly in the classroom. Miss X used corporal punishment as a tool to keep students in check, and once slapped me on my face for not doing the homework.
I came home and told my mother, who accompanied me to the school next day and complained to the principal about the slapping. Miss X never dared to slap me again even though she continued to punish other students physically.
One of the students who fell victim to her wrath was a boy who was always well behaved and performed well in academics. One day he forgot his math notebook home. The teacher checked everyone’s homework one by one by going to each desk; when it was his turn, he stood up and told her with a straight face that he forgot the notebook home and will bring it tomorrow. This infuriated her and she knocked him so hard that his head hit the wall and his glasses broke.
I was watching this but as a 9-year-old, I couldn’t stop her from letting out this fit of rage on the poor boy. I was too afraid of her hard hands landing on my body if I interrupted her despicable outburst of fury.
In retrospect, I can’t comprehend how these people could unleash their inner beast on such young children. Maybe they were victim of physical abuse too. Maybe they had toxic parents and household environment. They viewed students as emotionless machines who should obey and execute their commands, rather than as humans who could err, let alone as children. Such teachers lacked compassion for students’ needs or circumstances. Their only goal was to have discipline and churn out good grades; I guess that’s what they were measured on. I reckon this explains why a whole generation grew up with lack of empathy as it was not mirrored by most adults, hence we see increasing violence in the society.
Having this exposure of violence at school and challenges at home, my expectations to receive any nurturing care from my immediate environment were nominal.
Hence when we got to know at the beginning of the new class that a new person was going to be our class teacher, I was cautiously optimistic.
***
Our new teacher was a young girl named Robina who was 23 years of age and a fresh graduate straight out of university. She had received a degree in Pharmaceutical Studies from a reputed university in Multan and had completed an internship at PIMS Islamabad, one of the best medical institutes in Pakistan.
After her internship, she decided to come back to Vehari, which was her native city, to be with her ailing mother. She took up the teaching job at our school to make use of her education and to have a source of income. What a blessing that decision turned out to be for us!
Miss Robina was a soft-spoken person who rarely got upset. There was a strange sense of calm about her personality which made students feel at ease in her presence. She had dark black, curly hair and her smile was always reassuring, which made her look beautiful. I loved her choice of clothes; she wore light toned colors such as powder pink, sky blue and lilac with very tasteful patterned prints giving her a very positive and energetic vibe. She had a healing and comforting aura, just like the warmth of sun after a cold, rainy day.
Before she joined our class, ‘teacher’ was a frightening word for me. A teacher was someone who could subject you to insult as they pleased, who you were supposed to be afraid of and who was not supposed to be challenged. An absurd definition of “respect” was connected to how you engaged with teachers, where all space for asking questions was taken away. At that point we were too young to have formed strong opinions, so disagreement was out of question.
However, miss Robina taking charge of the class completely changed my relationship with the word ‘teacher’. She personified affection and nurtured us with such care that it won’t be an exaggeration to say that she changed the trajectory of my life.
At a tender age of 10, a child needs someone they can trust, who can correct them without making them feel unloved, who can guide them without the threat of taking their affection away if one made a mistake. Teaching goes way beyond just covering textbook curriculum in those vulnerable years as children are developing an understanding of the world around them, of people, and of right and wrong. It requires mentorship and role models who inspire children by practically demonstrating the values they ought to aspire to, instead of just feeding them religious theory.
Miss Robina was a person who came into my life at the right place and the right time; when I had gained enough consciousness to form my thinking and needed someone to mentor me. She laid the foundation of my cognitive development and taught me things that continue to benefit me in my journey of life. Here are a few contributions she made to my life which I will take with me to the end.
She gave her students confidence:
I was a shy girl growing up and didn’t have many friends. I usually sat in the back corner of the class and avoided any sort of attention from teachers or from other classmates, having deeply ingrained that I wasn’t any good. Having changed school at the age of 7 from English medium to Urdu medium, I struggled with understanding the concepts and would usually just cram and then regurgitate in the exam. Not many people seemed to care if students really learned the concept or if it was just superficial learning. Most teachers seemed to be concerned about if we had produced word to word replica of the text in the book and would give maximum marks to those who had regurgitated it the best. Due to this lack of conceptual understanding, I was always under confident about my academics.
Miss Robina was a pleasant change to this travesty of phenomena called “schooling”. She took interest in each individual student and made us feel seen. In short period of time, she learnt about the strengths and weaknesses of her students and pulled her strings to enable us to polish our strengths and overcome our weaknesses.
For example, she soon learned that I liked public speaking and had an interest in playing sports. So, she created opportunities for me to speak in front of larger audiences and would get the students an extra half an hour every 2–3 days to play in the sports ground, in addition to the usual lunch break. She created a system where the position of class monitor would rotate and different people would get a chance to lead the class, giving many students the confidence in their abilities to lead.
She had a genuine interest in seeing her students grow and would often share experiences from her student or personal life to help us set our vision for life. In those days, it was a big thing for young girls to move for an internship to the Capital from South Punjab, but she managed it fearlessly. Maybe that is why when about 8 years later, I didn’t flinch once when accepting an offer of internship from Competition Commission of Pakistan and moved to Islamabad for two months. Her story had given me self confidence that everything is possible, and sky is the limit.
She held space to ask questions:
Miss Robina had a very candid attitude towards all students regardless of their intelligence. I often struggled with geometry, and she always answered my questions patiently and took time to go over the concepts again. If a longer time was required, she would ask me to come to her in the free time or after school. In retrospect, she held space for her students to ask questions which laid the foundation of critical thinking for me.
She offered tuitions after school time probably to cover financial needs as the salary she got from school was not enough. I couldn’t join the after-school tuition class due to problems with pick and drop and the financial strain my parents were experiencing at the time. This gave me a major FOMO (fear of missing out) and my paranoia made me fear that the students who went to take tuitions would be better off as she will get closer to them. However, I didn’t experience any difference in her affection.
She respected the students:
One of the many things I loved about Miss Robina was that she respected her students just same as the students respected her. Our reverence for her was not stemming from the fear, as for most of the other teachers, but rather from admiration. Although she was a soft-spoken person and had untraditional and non-violent approach towards teaching, this never meant that her class didn’t maintain decorum. She had a great sense of humor and reprimanded us as needed, but in a humorous way with an underlying tone of affection.
In our culture, age and status is supposed to derive deference from others. However, I never believed in this hierarchy of age or status to have anything to do with respect. Neither as a kid, nor now as an adult. I believe that respect is earned and is not something you get on a platter.
The way Miss Robina treated us, we revered her for her generosity and kindness.
The psychological safety that I felt with her by being myself, led me even to respect myself and believe in my self-worth which I continue to practice even today. Her unconditional acceptance of her students was a stepping stone for self-acceptance for many of her students including myself.
She had conversations with the students:
Miss Robina would often discuss a multitude of topics with her students and asked for their opinions. For example, she would bring up different professions and how they contribute to the society. She shared her personal journey and dilemmas in choosing the path of Pharmaceutical Studies. Her primary ambition was to pursue a path in Medicine, but couldn’t make it to the medical college due to fierce competition. However, she had a desire to stay connected with medicine and hence, ended up with Pharmaceutics. Unfortunately, the turn of events at home lead her to leave her career in Pharmaceutics and come back to Vehari to be with her mother.
She was genuinely interested in learning about our ambitions and fueling them. In those days, I had recently learned about merchant navy and how financially attractive it was. So, when anyone asked about what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was “Merchant Navy”. I knew that it involved being in sea for most part of the year, but I viewed it as an adventurous challenge. When she learned about my aspirations, she was positively encouraging despite the absurdness of the idea.
My experience with grownups until then was that most of them were interested in giving monologues. They would share their perspectives and opinions and that was the end of it. They perceived children as dumb listeners who would absorb everything they hear without a question or without giving any input of their own. Most elders were not keen on “dialogue” and hearing what children had to say, which continues to be the case even today. Miss Robina changed that with her meticulous devotion to listening to her students and engaging them in dialogue, which for some odd reason helped me believe that I was smart and could achieve anything.
She understood her students:
Miss Robina had an empathy for personal circumstances of students and was never strict on any oversight or error that was out of our control. We used to have a Home Economics class (the boys used to get a holiday that day, I guess boys were not deemed necessary to learn basic life skills) and were supposed to bring all sorts of kitchen equipment to school to make and present food. I often struggled that day due to various logistical reasons that were not in my control, but she always covered up for me in front t of other students and gave me good marks along with positive reinforcements. I still have huge respect for her and for her generosity in those situations.
She gave a voice to her students:
Before Miss Robina, I was used to teachers taking a lot of space and declining it to students to be themselves. As I reflect on her demeanor, I realize that she always took very little space and encouraged the students to speak and express themselves as their true selves.
I remember there was a student in our class who faced challenges in speaking. He used to stutter which demanded him more time while reading during English or Urdu lesson. A lot of times, teachers ignored him when asking pupils to read out loud from the book. But Miss Robina often started with him and gave him a lot of time to read without showing any sign of hurry. The kindness she showed to him set a practical example of how one should treat others with physical challenges.
She was a calm person and for the two years I was her student, I never heard her raise her voice. Her demeanor set her apart. By creating more space for her students to just be, she gave them a voice, which has helped, at least me, come a long way.
***
I changed my school in grade 8 due to the language differences in curriculum and had to say goodbye to her along with my friends.
A few years after leaving the school, I learnt that she had died in a tragic car accident together with her mother and husband. The shock and disbelief accompanied me for many months to come and the longing to meet her once more still stays with me.
Despite having no village around me with nurturing relationships, I found a village in her during the most vulnerable years of my life. She died young but left a deep impact on me that despite being 20 years since I have seen her, I still miss her.
Miss Robina! I am grateful to you for the person you helped me to become. May you rest in eternal peace.
