Mrs. Kausar Amin made me write my essay seven times. I hated her then. Today, her voice lives in everything I write.
She was strict. Very strict. Students would whisper warnings about her class. “Take another teacher,” they said. “She never gives good marks. She makes you work too hard.” But somehow, year after year, we kept choosing her classes.
I remember my first essay coming back. Red marks everywhere. It looked like the paper was bleeding. I felt small. Stupid. Why couldn’t I write properly? My friends got their papers back with smiles and stars. Mine had questions, corrections, demands to think deeper.
“This is surface thinking,” she wrote. “Go deeper. What are you really trying to say?”
I didn’t want to go deeper. I wanted to pass. I wanted praise. I wanted to feel smart without working hard.
But she refused. Every essay came back with more red marks. “Better,” she would write, “but not good enough yet.” I began to think she simply didn’t like me. Some teachers are like that, I thought. They pick one student to torture.
Now I understand what she was doing.
Think about learning to ride a bicycle. Your father holds the seat at first. Then one day, he lets go. You wobble. You might fall. It hurts. You get angry at him. “Why did you let go?” But that’s exactly when you learn to balance. The difficulty is the lesson.
Mrs. Kausar Amin was letting go of the seat.
Other teachers were different. Mr. Karim praised everything. “Excellent work!” he would say, even when we knew it wasn’t. We felt good leaving his class. We told our parents he was the best teacher. But we learned nothing that stayed with us.
Miss Sultana was kind and gentle. She accepted our first drafts. She never made us struggle. We loved her class. But can you remember anything she taught? I can’t.
But Mrs. Kausar Amin? I remember everything. How to build an argument. How to cut unnecessary words. How to think before writing. How to revise until the work becomes real.
The strange thing is, we needed to dislike her to survive her class. If we had known how hard it would be, we might have run away. The anger gave us energy. We rewrote essays not because we wanted to learn, but because we wanted to prove her wrong.
“I’ll show her,” we thought. “I’ll write so well she’ll have nothing to criticize.”
And then, finally, we did. And she smiled. That smile felt better than a hundred easy compliments from easy teachers.
Here’s what I learned: the teachers who challenge us are the ones who believe in us. Mrs. Kausar Amin saw something in us that we couldn’t see ourselves. She knew we could write better, think deeper, work harder. She refused to let us settle for “good enough” because she knew we were capable of “excellent.”
The teachers who accept everything? Maybe they don’t believe we can do better. Maybe they’re tired. Maybe they want to be liked more than they want to teach. Whatever the reason, they’re not really helping us.
I see this pattern everywhere now. The cricket coach who makes you practice the same shot a hundred times. The music teacher who won’t let you move to the next song until you’ve mastered this one. The mathematics tutor who makes you solve problems until you can do them in your sleep.
They all seem cruel at the time. They all become treasured memories later.
This is the tragedy: we realize too late. By the time we want to say thank you, we might not have the chance. The teacher has retired. Or moved away. The words we should have said remain unsaid.
But I am fortunate. Mrs. Kausar Amin is still here. Still teaching, in her own way. I am still in touch with her. When I face a difficult moment, when I feel stuck, I know she is there—ready to help just as she did when I was a child.
That’s what amazes me most. Even now, even after all these years, I become that small student again in her presence. When I stand before her, I don’t feel like an adult. I feel like that schoolchild who brought essays covered in red marks. She still has that power—to make me want to be better, to push harder, to never settle.
I write now. It’s my profession. Every piece I work on, I hear her voice pushing me forward. Every draft I revise, I remember those red marks.
I hear Mrs. Kausar Amin’s voice: “Good, but not good enough yet. You can do better.”
So I persist. I revise and rethink. I refuse to accept work that’s merely acceptable. I push myself the way she once pushed me.
I also know that someday, maybe, one of them will understand.
Because here’s the truth that took me twenty years to learn: the teachers we remember aren’t the ones who made us feel good. They’re the ones who made us become good.
The difference matters. Feeling capable and being capable are not the same thing. Real teachers give us the second gift, even when it requires denying us the first.
Mrs. Kausar Amin taught me to write. But more than that, she taught me that excellence requires effort. That quality demands revision. That growth needs discomfort. That love sometimes looks like discipline.
These lessons extend far beyond writing. They shape how I work, how I think, how I live. When I face difficult tasks, I hear her voice: “Good, but not good enough yet. You can do better.”
And I do.
That’s her final gift. Not the ability to write well, but the refusal to accept writing poorly. Not the skill itself, but the standard. Not the knowledge, but the discipline.
She taught for forty years, shaping thousands of students. Each one of us carries her voice forward. Each one of us remembers the red marks, the high standards, the refusal to accept anything less than our best.
And here’s the beautiful part: she knows. She sees us now, grown and grateful. She sees what her teaching created. Not immediately, but eventually. Not in comfort, but in character.
Think about it. Mrs. Kausar Amin could have been popular. She could have accepted average work and been everyone’s favorite teacher. She could have gone home without the weight of disappointing students. She could have avoided complaints and criticism.
Instead, she chose the harder path. She chose to be temporarily disliked so we could permanently benefit. She chose our future over her present comfort.
This is rare. Most of us want to be liked now. We want immediate approval. We avoid conflict, dodge difficulty, choose the easier path. But the teachers who truly change lives think differently. They play the long game.
Tonight I’ll think of her with gratitude. Not a small gesture, and not too late. She knows. She knows what her teaching meant, what it still means. All the challenging teachers who persist, who refuse to make learning easy—they know that their temporary unpopularity creates permanent impact.
Because the teachers we remember aren’t those who made learning easy.
They’re the ones who made learning real.