The teacher's writing therapy

Hundreds of people thronged to him, as if he was a god, all with their children. Teach him sir for she may become a doctor one day, no one has studied in our family before sir, we are poor people sir, we need this to continue our family business sir, etcetera etcetera. Did they not realize he was a simple teacher who could inspire students, he wasn't a god who would magically make their mostly mediocre children into geniuses? The sad part was that in most cases what the students themselves wanted to study was quite unrelated to what their families wanted them to do, it wasn't that they were stupid or lazy, just that they were really really disinterested in what was being taught. You could force-feed knowledge on the unwilling or the uncaring, he'd tried teaching that to everyone but no one listened. Everyone wanted a doctor, engineer, foreign-educated, someone who did something big useful important and most of all made money, in their household. The young ones were into entrepreneurship and business but that's not what the families wanted from them, alas.

His trick at this point had been to only take the good interested ones that actually cared for what he had to teach, and just guide them in their quest for knowledge. Just the facilitation, without getting in their way. It is true, his former students were all in high posts doing incredible things, but he didn't want any credit for that, he had merely seen what they already had inside them and agreed to mentor them. Yet his selectiveness turned on him as it looked like he had a midas touch for turning anything he touched into a gold of a human being. In reality, all he did was polish existing gold, and that too barely.

One day, he decided to change his approach. Anyone can polish gold, he told himself, if I really want to deserve the respect I've been given, I must guide the unwilling, the unable, and the lazy to be where they deserve to be, where they want to be regardless of the fields their parents want them to take. That will be true mentorship and teaching, he realized. And then, his individual tutoring sessions turned into large evening tutoring classes, with dozens of students in each.

His first order of business was to identify what each of them really wanted, and what their families wanted out of them. And really whatever was inside of them, all those repressed emotions, the pressure, the intense desire to rebel, that all needed to have a safe outlet or his courses would just turn into one of those rowdy college classes. He made them write nonstop for ten minutes every day, if they put their pens down or stopped to think they'd lose points. Write whatever you want to he said, don't make it crappy, make it sane and good enough that people would not want to arrest you or kill you after reading it, but write whatever comes into your mind besides that. The unstructured writings proved way for more structured writing practices his students started finding therapeutic. Write about what your families want you to do, and explain why they want that, without stopping for ten minutes. Don't even stop your pen to think or you lose points. And the next day it would be, write about what you want to do in the future, even if you don't know write about what you definitely don't want to do, and evaluate how that would fit among the societal expectation from you, where those expectations can come from, how you can manage them. As those writing exercises went on for weeks and months, he realized something: the quality of those writings was improving, they were being more honest and more self-reflective, actually using it as an opportunity to turn over their own thoughts and emotions, trying to grapple those and trying to come up with ways to handle the expectations of their families. The success of the writing exercises gave him an idea. He got a couple more trusted former students who were looking for jobs, and had them start their own classes, alongside him, and they too would offer free- and guided- writing sessions upfront, except the writing took up 30 minutes total of the hour-and-half courses. These kids were writing five-hundred maybe a thousand words every class, and with their english courses at schools, and the tutored sessions, the quality was improving.