Teaching as a Way of Being
When I was a child, teaching wasn’t a dream or an ambition — it was my favorite game. I played it every single day, sometimes twice, sometimes three times, depending on how much imaginary homework my imaginary students had failed to do. I would stand in front of my invisible classroom, feet planted, shoulders squared, as if twenty or thirty silent, expectant faces were turned toward me, waiting for the lesson to begin.
The “board” was a Snow White picture hanging on my wall — Snow White herself smiling benevolently in the woods, perhaps wondering why she had been recruited into compulsory education. I covered her face with blank A4 sheets, arranging them with ceremonial precision, as though the paper itself carried authority. The subjects never mattered. Serbian, Maths, Music — I loved them all with the same uncomplicated loyalty. I wasn’t pretending to be a teacher of any particular discipline; I was pretending to be a teacher, full stop. That was the whole point.
Sometimes I paused mid‑sentence, pretending to wait for a question from the back row. Sometimes I nodded gravely at an imaginary student who had finally understood the difference between a high note and a low one. Sometimes I scolded the invisible troublemaker in the third row, who, in retrospect, was probably my own attempt at narrative tension. The room was quiet, but in my mind it hummed with life. I didn’t know it then, but I was rehearsing for a future that would feel uncannily similar.
And maybe that’s why, more than twenty years later, when I walked into my first real classroom, the moment felt strangely familiar — almost like stepping back into that childhood room. The faces were real now, the questions were real, the stakes were real, but the feeling was the same. Something in me recognized the space. I knew, with a quiet certainty, that there was no chance I would mess things up. How could I? I had been practicing since before I could count to a hundred (which didn’t stop me from confidently teaching Maths to a group of imaginary students).
For me, teaching is not about performance or competence. It is about students — and about how deeply I want them to feel what I have felt since I was a small, enthusiastic girl: that choosing education over not choosing education is one of the most wonderful things a person can do. That learning is freedom. That curiosity is joy. That a classroom, when it’s alive, is one of the most beautiful places a human being can occupy. I want students to feel the electricity of ideas, the way a thought can leap from one mind to another like a spark crossing a gap.
The first year went well. The students gave me warm, generous feedback at the end, the kind that should have made me feel proud. And I did feel proud. Just not in the way I expected. Because even though the classes were successful, I hadn’t yet achieved the one thing I truly wanted: that moment at the end of the hour when I say the class is over… and nobody moves.
I wanted my students to stay. Not out of obligation, not out of politeness — but out of genuine curiosity. I wanted to see them gather in small clusters, still talking, still thinking, still turning the ideas over like stones in their hands. I wanted the room to remain alive even after I stepped out of it. I wanted to witness that rare alchemy in which learning becomes self‑sustaining, where the teacher is no longer needed.
That didn’t happen in the first year. They listened, they learned, they thanked me — and then they left. And every time the door closed behind them, I felt a small ache, the kind that comes from knowing you’ve reached the surface of something but not yet its depth. It was like cooking a beautiful meal and watching everyone eat politely, compliment the seasoning, and then leave before dessert. I wanted dessert. I wanted the lingering. I wanted the aftertaste.
So I did the only thing that made sense: I took every pedagogical class I could find. Not because I doubted my ability to teach, but because I wanted to learn how to create an atmosphere in which students don’t want the class to end. I wanted to understand how to build a space where curiosity becomes self‑sustaining, where the hour is not a container but a spark. I wanted to learn how to make the room feel like a place where ideas behave like unruly citizens — loud, opinionated, impossible to dismiss.
This extra investment really helped me. In my second year, things were different — not dramatically, not every week, but enough for me to feel the shift. And then, on a few occasions, the thing I had been longing for finally happened: The moment I said the class was over… nobody moved.
The students stayed. Not because they were shy, not because they were waiting for instructions — but because they were still discussing the topic with each other. Still thinking. Still turning the ideas over. Still alive in the space we had created together. It was the kind of moment teachers dream of, the kind that makes all the administrative emails and broken microphones worth it.
The first time I witnessed that my methods were working, it felt almost magical. I stood there, watching them, and realized they didn’t need me anymore. They were there for each other — listening, questioning, expanding each other’s thoughts with a seriousness that didn’t feel heavy but bright. I told them three times that they could leave, but nobody cared. Even though it was Friday, even though it was time for lunch, about thirty-five curious minds were still gathered around the source I had given them, still arguing gently, still discovering.
And the best part — the part that made my chest feel too full, as if someone had quietly slipped an entire second heartbeat inside it — was that they were behaving like one entity. The kind that argues passionately, interrupts each other mid‑sentence, leans forward with shining eyes, and forgets entirely that the person speaking is someone they met five weeks ago. They weren’t performing curiosity for me, offering the kind of dutiful nods students sometimes give when they suspect the teacher is expecting them to do. No, they were living the spark for themselves, with the unselfconscious intensity of people who have forgotten they are in a lecture hall at all.
It felt like watching a flock of birds take flight — that sudden, collective lift, that effortless coordination, that sense of something larger than the sum of its parts. Except these weren’t birds; they were students discussing the topic with a depth and sincerity that made the room feel sacred.
In that moment, I finally admitted to myself the truth I had been carrying around for decades, like a small, folded note in my pocket: Teaching isn’t something I do. It’s something I am. A way of being in the world. A way of listening so closely that I hear the shape of someone’s thought before they finish speaking. A way of loving that has nothing to do with sentimentality and everything to do with attention. A way of staying awake to the fragile, luminous miracle of people trying to understand something together.
And standing there, watching thirty-five students behave like one, I realized that the imaginary classroom of my childhood had never been imaginary at all. It had been a rehearsal for this — for the moment when the world finally caught up with the game I had been playing all along.
