The Teacher Who Changed Me Without Knowing
By Farooq Kperogi
I am just learning that today is World Teachers' Day. I honestly didn't know such a day existed.
In celebration of World Teachers’ Day, I wish to express my deep appreciation for Mr. Agba Bio Seriki, my high school biology teacher at Baptist Grammar School in Baruten, Kwara State, whose impact on my intellectual trajectory has been nothing short of transformative.
One particular moment remains etched in my memory: during a biology class, he casually remarked that the human brain is at its most receptive to learning and retaining new information between the ages of 5 and 25.
After this period, he explained, the brain’s capacity for acquiring novel knowledge diminishes, shifting instead to refining and expanding on what has already been learned.
The gravity of this statement struck me profoundly. Sensing my reaction, he looked at me intently, as if to underscore its significance, and reiterated the point.
I was only 16, yet that class marked the beginning of a personal race against the clock.
Driven by a sense of urgency, I became an insatiable reader, haunting the school library during every free hour and seeking out conversations with older adults who owned books I longed to explore.
(At 17, for instance, I had read Friedrich Engels' and Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto and The German Ideology even though I struggled to understand them! I also read Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams that a University of Ibadan sociology graduate shared with me, and I deeply enjoyed it. Of course, I memorized the dictionary!)
This hunger for knowledge followed me to Bayero University in Kano, where I immersed myself in an eclectic range of disciplines—philosophy, psychology, parapsychology, history, sociology, political science, and beyond—often to the bewilderment of my classmates in mass communication.
Unbeknownst to them, I was still racing against that age-25 threshold, determined to enrich my intellectual and epistemic reservoir while my cognitive faculties were at their zenith.
By the time I reached 25, I had amassed a wealth of knowledge, yet I never quite felt it was enough.
Nonetheless, I am profoundly grateful to Mr. Seriki for instilling in me the drive to seize every moment of intellectual opportunity. He may not remember that class or my rapt attention, but his words altered the course of my life forever.