My favourite teacher has no flesh and blood, only bricks, roads and freedom

When my office asked me to write about my favourite teacher for Teachers' Day, I went through the different stages of my life, trying to find a name. I thought about school. I thought about university. I thought about the teachers whose classrooms I remember and the lessons I still carry.

But I could not think of a single person I would instinctively call my favourite teacher.

The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that the closest thing I had to one was not a person at all. It was the University of Dhaka campus.

I was a fairly ordinary student there. Nothing extraordinary. I did well enough to get grades I was happy with, but I was never the sort of student teachers remembered years later. I did not have a large circle of friends, and I was not particularly close to any of my teachers.

Beyond the conversations necessary to get through a semester's coursework, I cannot remember standing outside a classroom and talking to a teacher for even five minutes.

That does not mean my teachers were bad. Quite the opposite. I was fortunate to have some genuinely wonderful teachers during my academic life. But none of them became the person I would immediately name if someone asked me who my favourite teacher was.

Perhaps that is because I have always understood teaching a little differently.

A teacher, to me, is someone who teaches you something. It does not have to be a grand lesson. It can be how to write your first alphabet, how to understand liberalism, how to cook something edible, or simply how to enjoy being alive.

I have learnt these things from different people at different points in my life. I consider all of them my teachers.

But of everything I have learnt, my favourite lesson has been how to experience life itself. And that is what my campus taught me.

Lessons without a classroom

My university never sat me down and taught me how to live. There was no syllabus for independence, no lecture on loneliness, no course on finding happiness when things do not go your way. Yet, over four and a half years, somehow, I learnt all of these things there.

I learnt how to be happy in a room shared with 25 other girls. I learnt that financial hardship can make life difficult without necessarily becoming the biggest problem in it. I learnt how much more sense my mother's words began to make once I was away from home.

I learnt how to get through a high fever on my own. How to find something to be happy about after a disappointing result. How to notice the beauty of Dhaka after rain, or the particular softness of a winter afternoon.

The campus introduced me to people from all over the country. They came with different families, backgrounds, beliefs, habits and ideas about what a good life should look like.

For the first time, I was constantly surrounded by people who were different from me.

And I learnt that being different did not necessarily mean being distant. Sometimes, the things we have in common are easier to see once we realise how different we are.

The campus also taught me something I did not expect to learn there: being alone is not necessarily a sad thing.

There were days when I walked around by myself, ate alone, sat somewhere with a book or simply watched the campus move around me.

I learnt to enjoy those moments. Sometimes solitude is beautiful. Sometimes the moments we remember most clearly are the ones we experienced alone, without having to explain them to anyone.

And then there was freedom.

For someone who had spent most of her life moving between familiar routines, expectations and instructions, university freedom felt almost strange at first.

Here, I could make choices. I could make mistakes. I could get things wrong and figure them out later. More importantly, I could slowly begin to discover who I was when I was no longer simply being the daughter, student or person that other people expected me to be.

I learnt that freedom can be frightening. It can leave you without anyone to tell you what to do next. But it can also be beautiful.

People often say that as university life progresses, the campus somehow grows bigger while the number of people around you becomes smaller. That has been true for me.

My undergraduate years are over now, at least officially. I do not have as much time for my friends as I once did. I do not attend classes regularly anymore. The long, pointless conversations that once seemed to fill entire afternoons have become less frequent. Life has moved on.

There are responsibilities now. There is work. There is the quiet, persistent question of what comes next. But whenever I return to the campus, something in me changes.

I feel happy. I feel lighter. For a little while, I feel like a free bird again, moving through the familiar roads without anyone telling me where I should go or how far I should dare to fly.

The campus seems to tell me, without words, to keep going. It makes me feel that I have potential. That I should try. That perhaps I can do more than I think I can.

The teacher who never said a word

For four and a half years, I do not remember a single university teacher explicitly telling me that I had potential and should keep trying.

Perhaps they did not know I needed to hear it. Perhaps I never gave them a reason to say it. Perhaps that is simply how my university life unfolded.

But the campus, in its own inexplicable way, has always made me feel capable of something more.

How, then, could I name someone else as my favourite teacher?

My favourite teacher has no flesh and blood. It has no voice I can recognise in a crowded room. No office door I can knock on when I need advice. And yet it has accompanied me through some of the most formative years of my life.

It has seen my ordinary days, my disappointments and my small victories. It has watched me grow, stumble and slowly try to understand myself. And it has never seemed disappointing enough to leave me behind.

Every time I return, it is still there. The same roads. The same buildings. The same corners that somehow feel different because I am no longer the person who first walked through them.

Is that not, in some strange way, what a good teacher does?

Stays patient with a student, even when the student has not yet learnt how to recognise her own worth.

Perhaps I am asking too much of a university campus. Perhaps none of these lessons were ever deliberately taught. But learning does not always happen because someone stands in front of you and explains something. Sometimes you simply stay somewhere long enough for the place to change you.

My campus changed me.

Now, slowly, my time with this favourite teacher is coming to an end. My university days are numbered, and the thought makes me sad in a way I cannot quite explain.

Beyond these familiar roads and buildings is a city full of uncertainty, expectations and the demands of adult life. When I leave, who will remind me to keep trying? Who will make me feel that I can still fly when the world starts to feel too heavy?

I sometimes wonder whether, if I return years from now, the campus will still feel like mine. Will I still be able to walk its roads and find comfort in its familiar corners? Will I still feel that strange sense of freedom? Will it still give me the courage I have always associated with this place?

I do not know.

But on this Teachers' Day, I want to thank the place that taught me some of the most important lessons of my life without ever announcing that it was teaching me anything.

Thank you for teaching me to live. To be alone. To be free. To notice beauty in ordinary things. Thank you for giving me the courage to imagine a life beyond what I already know. And thank you for never making me feel that I have run out of chances.

Perhaps one day, when I return as someone who no longer belongs to a university classroom, I will walk through those gates and feel that familiar lightness again.

Perhaps the campus will still have something left to teach me. Until then, I will carry its lessons with me. And, somewhere in my head, I will keep hearing the voice I have always imagined coming from those familiar roads, "Tazin, keep trying. You have potential. You can do it."