Nodira opa taught mathematics in room 12 of our school for forty-one years, in the same room, at the same desk, from 1979 until she retired in June 2020.
In 2022 a group of her old pupils — there are a lot of us, and some of us have money now — decided to pay for a brass plate for the door of that room.
The text went to the workshop in an email, in English and Uzbek, because two of the pupils live abroad and one of them sent the money from Canada. The English line was supposed to read: THE TEACHER'S ROOM — NODIRA KARIMOVA, 1979–2020.
The plate arrived in March. It is beautiful. It says:
THE TEACHERS' ROOM — NODIRA KARIMOVA, 1979–2020.
One apostrophe, moved one letter to the right, and the room stopped being hers and became everybody's.
The group chat that evening had four hundred messages in it. Half of us wanted a new plate. The man in Canada offered to pay for it twice. A pupil of hers from 1998, who is a lawyer, wrote a long message about the contract with the workshop.
Somebody sent a photograph of the plate to Nodira opa, who is seventy-two and reads messages slowly and answers them completely.
Her answer came the next morning, and it ended the argument in three sentences.
"Leave it. I was one of many. In that room there were thirty-nine other teachers before me, and Zuhra opa taught at that desk for eleven years before I ever walked into the building, and somebody will teach at it after me."
Then she wrote one more line, because she is a mathematics teacher and she has never let a mistake go past without naming it: "The apostrophe is in the wrong place for what you meant, and in the right place for what is true. Both things can be correct at once. That is unusual. Keep it."
The plate is on the door of room 12. Nobody has changed it.
Every September the new mathematics teacher — a man of twenty-six, a pupil of hers from 2014 — takes a cloth and cleans it before the first lesson, and he tells his class the story of the apostrophe, which takes about four minutes and is the only grammar lesson he ever gives.