Pakistani schools are full of young people who already know how to show up for each other. We just haven’t trained them yet.
I was observing a mentee’s class last term, one of those routine observation visits where you sit quietly at the back with a notepad and try not to distract anyone. The lesson was moving along well enough. But what caught my attention had nothing to do with the teaching.
In the third row, a Grade 10 student had quietly shifted her chair a few inches closer to the girl beside her, a Grade 8 student who had recently transferred from another school and still carried that particular kind of stillness that new students wear when they are not yet sure where they belong. Without a word, the older girl slid her open notebook across. Pointed to something. The younger one nodded. A small moment. Thirty seconds, at most.
But I stopped writing my observation notes entirely.
Nobody had arranged that exchange. Nobody had trained the older student to do it. And yet something genuinely useful had just happened, something a teacher standing at the front of the room could not have engineered, no matter how skilled.
That is the thing about peer support. It finds its own way in. The question is what happens when we decide to take it seriously.
Continue reading “Your Teenager’s Best Counsellor Sits One Row Behind Them”
