A teacher as a counterweight
My art teacher did more than explain form, colour and perspective. Looking back, he became a counterweight during a period when people either strongly liked or strongly rejected me. At school I was rarely allowed to disappear neutrally into the room. I was usually pulled toward approval or resistance, encouragement or distance.
Being constantly visible is tiring. Some teachers liked my independence; others saw it as a disturbance. Perhaps I was uncomfortable, perhaps too direct, perhaps simply a pupil who did not fit the available drawer.
The story of the top grade
I was his favourite pupil, not because he spoiled me, but because he saw something: structure, a feeling for form, precision and perhaps the ability to accept criticism.
Once he asked whether he might give another student the top grade and place me second. The other student urgently needed that grade for a scholarship. A teacher asks such a question only of someone he believes can understand the larger picture.
It was more than a matter of marks. It was a quiet test: what is recognition worth when it can help another person more at that moment? I already had the inner confirmation. The other student needed the formal one as a key.
Encouraging and restraining
He encouraged me, but he also slowed me down when I became overconfident. That made him important. Encouragement without limits breeds vanity; criticism without encouragement makes a person small. He could do both: strengthen and correct.
In retrospect he took on a small fatherly role. My own father was strict and rarely praised me. The art teacher gave me recognition with proportion, not blind admiration but demanding attention. Perhaps that is the best form of support: seeing talent without letting it grow wild.
The drug misunderstanding
I never took drugs, not even hashish. Not from obedient virtue, but because I wanted neither to expand nor to blur my consciousness artificially. Self-control mattered to me. A glass of wine or a beer belonged to a different category, but drugs did not.
All the more absurdly, my first school apparently suspected me of taking them. I learned this only later. My appearance, independence and refusal to behave predictably were enough for adults to construct a story. Reality was less exciting: I simply thought differently.
The episode taught me how quickly institutions replace observation with suspicion. Once a label exists, every gesture seems to confirm it. My art teacher was different. He looked before he judged.
What remained
Much later I realised how deeply his lessons had travelled with me. As a dental technician and dentist I needed form, symmetry, proportion and function. When building houses, websites and technical systems, structure again decided whether something merely looked attractive or actually worked.
He did not teach me to decorate. He taught me to see relationships, to reduce excess and to respect the whole. He also showed that fairness may mean surrendering first place without losing one’s value.
Some teachers transmit information. A few give structure. Their influence often becomes visible only after decades, when one notices that their way of seeing has quietly become one’s own.
