Dear students,
Today is the last Wednesday of the school year
2022-23, coincidentally it’s the longest day of the year in the northern
hemisphere. It has been a great pleasure to be the teacher of such a nice
cohort of students. I consider myself lucky to have hardworking, respectful,
and open-minded students like you. Despite all that pressure on your shoulders,
you have done an amazing job and deserve a lot of congratulations and applause.
However, this letter is not written to praise you or to exaggerate your
achievements. I believe it is already done by many other teachers, counselors,
and parents (including myself). This letter is an apology with a few pieces of
advice for your future from a teacher who considers himself a life-long learner
and a constant appreciator of the nature around him.
Unlike many others, I am not good at writing
praises on demand or because of a sudden request from a person nearby. I write
in order to feel that I am completely free of the world that binds and limits
my horizon. I write because it makes me express my thoughts better than I
speak. I write because, like falling in love with someone, writing makes me
feel how lonely I would have been if the words on paper did not save me from
drowning in the dizzying whirlpool of life. This is probably why I wrote the
most banal, the most cliché, and the most mediocre words in your yearbook when
you ask me. The same thing can be said for the mundane pieces of advice on your
grade reports as well. However, when I get home and sit in silence to organize
my thoughts, when I give myself the luxury of being away from the invisible
ropes of modern life, when I look out the window and feel the responsibility of
being a teacher apart from the bureaucratic duties lurking in the school
corridors; the words come to me in full sincerity. I sit and write what I truly
wish to write.
Honestly speaking, I sometimes need months to write
a good paragraph and I believe if it’s going to be a beautiful paragraph,
I won’t mind wasting months. I believe in slowness, believe in being gentle and
kind to everything in the universe, believe that the worst thing a person can
do is to speak loudly when s/he comes to a stream of water in a silent forest.
I don’t expect people around me to understand my little self-indulgent
mannerism but still, as a teacher, I feel responsible that I should tell my
students the right thoughts, the right behavior, the right actions in a world
where speed, intelligence, popularity, and overconfidence are respected as
characteristics of high quality.
In the name of preparing you for the future world,
we teach you how to solve differential equations, we teach you how to calculate
the expected value of a random variable, we teach you how to deal with chemical
reactions and how to analyze cell anatomy. But in all these never-ending
sessions of preparation, we rarely talk about being kind to the weak, being
generous to those who need help, being wise to those who need our advice,
and being respectful to those who sacrifice a lot for us. So here I am,
filling that gap with my final words:
Please be kind to everyone and everything in life.
Not just humans and animals, even non-living objects deserve treatment with
respect and serenity (Closing a door gently instead of slamming it could be a
good start.). Be generous to those who are not as fortunate as you, understand
them, sympathize with them, if possible help them. Read a lot of literary
fiction so that you can live under the skin of those whom you will never meet
in real life, see the world from their perspective, feel what they feel, get
angry with them, and be cheerful about their fortunate moments. The power of
literature does not come from beautifully phrased sentences only, it also comes
from the unifying characteristics of human emotions. Only literature can make
us understand the human with his/her existential conditions. Science and
Mathematics can take us to the objective reality of atoms, molecules, planets,
and galaxies… But human is not something created in a vacuum of eternal space
or in the labyrinth-like rooms of laboratories. It is created by society, by
the systems which are also human inventions, by the institutions which are
mostly impermanent and full of flaws. So to understand human means to
understand the world surrounding him/her, to understand the innumerable ropes
that tie him/her to the world s/he feels that s/he is thrown into. This is why
I am always asking you to read a lot. Only by reading the world literature, you
can understand the modern human and your position in the modern world as an
individual.
In addition to reading a lot, perhaps something
comes with reading, I strongly recommend you not to be afraid of being alone.
Don’t sacrifice your alone-ness (Not loneliness. Loneliness is a feeling;
alone-ness is a physical state.) for noisy crowds or the self-righteousness
that you might find in the flows of social media. Have some self-respect before
having self-confidence. Creativity is not a magical elixir. Ideas come to
everyone but the seeds cling to life only if the mind is humid and warm enough
to convert those ideas into a sapling, then a tree, and then a
forest. Being alone is like being asleep, it is the time when your mind
reflects on things that happened recently or the books you read a few days ago
or the conversation you had with your friend yesterday. It is a war of random
movements and most of the creative ideas come from these random crashes.
Remember, it’s not magic, it’s mostly the courage of embracing seemingly
distant ideas at the same time and putting them together. Once you focus on
that cloud of ideas, you will realize that a meaningful picture will slowly
emerge. In that moment, “focus” is the key word. Never fool yourself with the
idea that you can do two things at the same time. Do one thing at a time. Great
minds in history are great not because they are extremely smart. They are
great because they can focus on one task for long hours. They don’t feel
boredom in their own presence. They feel joy and enchantment.
Finally, I also
recommend you to be irreplaceable. No matter what you do or where you go, be
the best at “at least one thing” so that people around you cannot even imagine
that it can be done without you. Some people exist more when they are absent,
be one of them. If you have a passion for something, don’t stop chasing it.
Passions make us human, not knowledge or power. You can never see a monkey or a
cat practicing for better jumps. Humans are the only species that practice to
be better at certain tasks. We constantly practice for things that we hate
(exams, interviews, speeches…) so why not make a rule for ourselves that will
make us practice one thing that we actually love to do. As I have said in class
before, do not sacrifice your love for Art/Sports for your job in Science/Math, and also do not sacrifice studying Science/Math for doing Art/Sports. These two
can go together quite well and if you have a daily routine, some
self-discipline, a bit of courage for being at the front, and a bit of faith in the
future of humanity; there is nothing that you cannot manage in the long run. No
one claims that digging a well with a needle is easy but at the same time, no
one can deny that it could be done if you are stubborn enough.
I can write more but it is going to be another boring and lengthy message from your Math teacher so I am stopping here. Let me finish with a song that I used to listen quite often when I was in university. Have a great summer. See you at the end of August.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1zBEWyBJb0
Ali Rıza Arıcan – June 21st 2023
* The picture on top of the page is a Chinese proverb, saying "The more you sweat in practice, the less you will bleed in the battle."
