I'm Shankar Vedantham and from Hidden Brain Media, this is my unsung hero, stories where one person reached

out to help another in a time of need.

Over the next few days, we'll be celebrating Teacher Appreciation Week,

bringing you stories about educators who powerfully impacted the lives of their students.

My unsung hero was a teacher's assistant named Max.

He would refer me to books and stories and I really became an avid reader at that point of money.

I still remember that day in the hallway of just my teacher being like, I know what's going on and you're going to be okay. Today's story comes from Azim Sharif.

In 1997, Azim was a 10th grader at a high school in Vancouver.

He had an English teacher named Darrell Wachem.

He took on this kind of father role for a lot of kids who were at the time in sort of bad straits, me included.

It was a tough time for me personally, had some family stuff going on,

was in a bad mental health position.

He noticed that and kind of swooped in at a time when I really needed somebody to do so.

And I remember him saying, I know you don't think you're

important enough for somebody to care about this, but you are.

You are important enough.

And it was just such a reassuring thing for somebody

who's reeling at the age of 15.

Darrow introduced Azim for psychology

and sparked an intellectual curiosity in him. Eventually, Azin became. and my intro psych class. The last class is always a class on positive psychology and I always leave the students

with these three tasks which have been empirically demonstrated to actually improve people's

happiness for several months.

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