People differ in their cognitive capacities. Anyone who has ever taught knows this, without needing to announce it. Some students think with an ease that feels almost unfair; others struggle to find coherence, to hold a line of thought steady. And this inequality — this strange, unchosen distribution of intellectual gifts — is not something we can correct simply by wishing it away.
But I also know that our task as teachers is not to sort human beings into categories. It is not our role to decide who is “gifted” and who is not, who deserves encouragement and who does not. I refuse to treat potential as something I can measure from the outside.
I will illustrate this through an example. In my second semester of studying pharmacy, I took a lab course that pushed every one of us to our limits. For seven straight weeks, we spent each afternoon in the laboratory, measuring, titrating, adjusting — chasing precision so exact that a single misplaced drop could undo an entire experiment. We were expected to detect the faintest shift in colour, to record results with a level of accuracy I have never again needed in my actual professional life. It was, without exaggeration, harder than anything I later did during my studies or as a pharmacist.
(It's funny. These days, whenever something feels difficult, I ask myself: Is it titration? No? Then why am I complaining? Honestly, I measure every life challenge against that nightmare, and fortunately, none of them has ever come close.)
I remember how small I felt in that room. How clumsy. How convinced I was that everyone else could titrate with a steadiness I simply didn’t possess. I wasn’t one of the “gifted” students. I was anxious all the time, imprecise in ways that embarrassed me, and, if I’m honest, someone who hated being there in the first place. It was a space where my mind did not shine, where my strengths were invisible, and where I learned what it feels like to be the student who seems out of their depth.
At the end of the lab, I was the only student who barely passed — number 70 out of 70. There it was, in black and white: quantitative evidence that I was, quite literally, the worst. And I remember looking at that result with a strange mix of shame and relief. Shame, because it confirmed everything I had feared about myself in that room. Relief, because even at the bottom of the list, I had still made it through.
It was the kind of moment that teaches what it feels like to be the student who doesn’t shine, who struggles, who survives only by a thread.
Over time, though, I changed. I improved. I met people who inspired me. I softened my resistance to the idea of becoming a pharmacist. I learned how to study, how to be efficient, how to trust that effort accumulates even when it feels invisible. And slowly, I began to feel a lot steadier in laboratories. They never became my favourite places, but they stopped being a battlefield.
By my fifth semester, I had grown into a completely different student. I ended up at the top of every lab course — the same student who had once scraped by as number 70 out of 70. The same hands that once trembled over a titration curve now worked with confidence. The same mind that once felt clumsy now understood the logic of the tasks. It wasn’t brilliance; it was growth. It was the simple, stubborn fact that one bad course or one set of bad results does not define anyone. I simply needed time. And I needed a few colleagues who made me believe that anything was possible — even for someone who was never in love with chemistry in the first place.
And this is precisely why I refuse to label students. I know what it feels like to be misjudged by a moment, to be reduced to a number. I know how wrong that judgment can be. Teaching demands the humility to recognize that students are always in motion, always unfinished, always capable of surprising us.
It also demands a kind of moral imagination: the ability to see a student not only as they are, but as they might be with time, guidance, and encouragement. The best teachers I’ve had were the ones who held faith in me when I had none. They lent me their confidence until I could generate my own. They treated my mind as something worth investing in, even when I was still unsure.
And so, when I teach now, I try to remember the girl in the lab — the one who hated titration, who felt stupid, who finished dead last. I teach for her. I teach for every student who walks into a classroom carrying the quiet fear that they are not enough. I teach with the stubborn belief that potential is not a fixed quantity, and that intellectual growth often happens in the shadows: slowly, invisibly, until one day it becomes undeniable.
Nonetheless, teaching also means living with the reality that not every student will grow in the way we hope. Some investments will be wasted, some seeds will never take root, and some minds will remain closed no matter how gently or persistently we knock. That is part of the work — the part no one likes to admit.
And yet, despite this, I still believe it is better to believe in every student. Because if I have learned anything in this life, it is this: Most humans don’t need miracles. They need someone to believe in them long enough for them to start believing in themselves. And our job, as teachers, is to make that growth possible — not by sorting students into boxes, but by refusing to give up on the minds entrusted to us, even when the outcome is uncertain. For it is in those uncertain moments that learning breathes — stretching, stumbling, unfolding — until a mind finds its own shape in the world.
