Describe a person who has influenced you

I'd like to talk about my secondary school English teacher, Mr Hassan, who had a big influence on me when I was around fifteen years old. I knew him for three years because he taught my class for the entire upper school. He wasn't just a normal teacher who came in, read from the textbook and left. He was very passionate about reading and he often stayed after class to discuss books with students who were interested. The reason he influenced me so much was that he changed the way I looked at studying. Before his class, I used to study only to pass exams. But he kept telling us that the real point of education was to think for yourself, not to memorise. He gave us essay topics that didn't have a single correct answer, and he expected us to defend our opinions in class. Because of him, I started reading books outside of school, mostly novels and biographies. I also became more confident about speaking in front of people. Even now, when I'm preparing for a presentation or writing something important, I think about the way he taught us to organise our ideas. He's probably the main reason I ended up studying literature. I'm genuinely still grateful for that.

The person who comes to mind straight away is my uncle Faisal — he passed away a few years ago, but his influence on me is something I only really started to understand after he was gone. I'd known him my entire childhood, since he lived just two streets away from us and we'd spend most weekends at his house. By profession he was a civil engineer — he spent most of his career working on infrastructure projects in rural areas of our province — but what made him remarkable wasn't his work, it was the way he engaged with people. He had this rare habit of treating children's questions as seriously as any adult's, which, looking back, was extraordinary. His influence on me came less from anything specific he said and more from how he carried himself. He read voraciously, kept handwritten notebooks of observations from his travels, and never seemed to be in a hurry. I remember asking him once why he bothered writing things down, and he said something I've never forgotten — that paying attention to ordinary moments was a discipline, not an accident. That idea has stayed with me ever since. It's shaped how I read, how I take notes for my own work, and even how I try to listen to people. Looking back, I think that's the thing about people who really change you — you don't notice it happening. You only see it later, and by then it's already part of how you think. That's exactly what he was to me.