Student Repays Teachers for Giving Lessons in Life : Education: Graduating senior says he wanted to thank them for the examples they set. 18 0f 30 accept his dinner invitation.

When Naisan Geula’s mother asked him what he wanted for a graduation present, the Claremont High School senior didn’t ask for a car or a ski trip.

What Geula wanted was a home-cooked meal and an evening of good fellowship and songs for a special group of friends: all of his former teachers, first-grade through high school.

He wanted to thank them.

“In a lot of ways they shaped my character when I was young,” said Geula, now a ripe old 17. “By their great zeal and their own example, they showed me what it was like to be an adult.”

More than half of the invited teachers--18 out of 30--honored the youth’s request. And by 7 p.m., the Geula living room looked like a faculty lounge.

“I was Naisan’s second-grade teacher,” said Charlyne Warren of Chaparral Elementary School, identifying herself for posterity before a video camera held by a family friend at last week’s dinner.

“I was going to tease him and say, ‘Let me see your handwriting,’ ” Warren said. “He had so many ideas. He just couldn’t express them fast enough.”

Retired teacher Julie Hardison said the bearded young man had grown a lot since he was in fifth grade at Foothill Country Day School. “He didn’t enjoy writing papers too much,” she said. “He enjoyed talking.”

Geula is an honors student who is graduating a semester early to do Bahai church-related service on St. Christopher Island in the West Indies. Eventually he hopes to attend medical school.

He plays the piano, races bicycles, runs cross-country and studies Persian and Arabic in his spare time. But he also finds his classes entertaining; he said his teachers made him this way.

“In math, you work and you work and you work and, once you get it, it’s exhilarating,” he said. “Something like biology and history--where there’s a lot of memorization of facts and process--once you understand something fully, it’s really neat to be able to apply it.”

Geula’s enthusiasm about school sometimes puzzles his classmates. “You hear comments like, ‘Naisan’s so strange,’ ” said Ezra Parker, 17. “He bugs people who don’t like his comments or attitude. He doesn’t belongs to any cliques. He doesn’t conform to anyone else’s standards.”

Parker was among a handful of friends invited to the party.

Though some might find such a graduation gathering a bit strange, in Geula’s family, it makes perfect sense. “I am overwhelmed to see so much energy, craftsmanship, has gone into the education of one person,” Naisan’s mother, Keysan Geula, told the teachers.

“There are a few things in life you cannot repay,” said his father, Dr. Arsalan Geula. “One of them is teaching.”

Ann Gallagher, seventh-grade math teacher at Foothill Country Day School, confessed she had never expressed such gratitude to her own teachers. “You really don’t, lots of times, see the point of what people are, quote, forcing you to do. Your interests are social and that kind of thing.