Have you ever wondered what makes stars beautiful?
I found the answer during French class in my senior year of high school. I decided to take AP French since I’d always been quick with languages, but for some reason, I just couldn’t keep pace with the course. Everything felt like it was moving too fast — college applications, choosing majors, and trying to enjoy (survive) my last year of high school. I tried desperately to find control in the middle of the chaos, which, as I think most of us have experienced, often leads to the opposite result. Eventually, I transferred out of the AP classroom and into French Honors.
I’ll admit, my pride was a little bruised walking into that class. It was a small class of seven students, and I’m sure it wasn’t hard for everyone to guess why there was a sudden new addition a month into the school year. But when I walked out of class that day, I felt better than I did when I entered, a feeling I hadn’t really had in a while. Dr. Houston had a rare ability to bring back curiosity, mischief, and laughter; we opened up because he treated us like equals, not just students.
The class became its own little world. We joked, teased, and learned like old friends sitting around a café table. One of the books we read was The Little Prince, which still stands out to me more than any other.
The Little Prince tells the story of a little boy traveling from planet to planet in search of understanding. He appears before a pilot who has crash-landed in the Sahara Desert and tells him about the people he has met along the way — each one a reflection of who we become when we grow up: a king obsessed with control, a vain man desperate for admiration, a businessman who counts stars but never sees their beauty, and a geographer who records the world without ever exploring it. The Little Prince also tells the pilot about his rose, vain, and sometimes difficult, yet he still loves it deeply. When he arrives on Earth and finds a field of roses just like hers, he’s heartbroken. His rose isn’t unique after all. Then he meets a fox who teaches him one of life’s simplest, most beautiful lessons:
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
Through this, the Little Prince realizes that love and meaning come from care, time, and connection, not rarity or perfection. Later, as he prepares to leave Earth, he says, “The stars are beautiful, because of a flower that cannot be seen.” He understands that the love we give to others changes how we see the world, even after they’re gone.
By the end, a pilot who had forgotten how to imagine learns his most valuable lessons from the Little Prince who is only a child, but whose innocence and wonder allowed him to see the world with his heart rather than his thoughts. While Dr. Houston wasn’t a little boy like the Prince, he might have once been a pilot stranded in the desert, like I was that year, and as many of us are at one point. In that small classroom, he became the Little Prince for all of us.
Sometimes we forget how to see the world with wonder until someone reminds us. That’s what Dr. Houston did for me. His class taught me that love lives in the moments we tend to — the patience of a teacher, the laughter of friends, the comfort of belonging.
In a time of need, the planet he created, one filled with laughter, curiosity, and quiet understanding, was a place I will always treasure. It taught me to value love not as something that lasts forever in a physical sense, but as something that changes the way you see a starry night.
Although that class had to end, I’ll always carry parts of it with me, like the pilot carries his memories of the Little Prince. And when I look out of my dorm window on a cloudless night, that class, Dr. Houston, and my classmates are some of the flowers that make up my view.
