Good Lessons from Experience

We were sitting after golf and the conversation drifted around to stories about how we had learned our craft, (most of us it turned out learned the hard way). One of the younger teachers told this story.

"I was instructing my Math 10 students in my portable on a rather stormy and rainy day. As I outlined my solution on the board, to a problem that a number of students were having difficulty with, I was thinking about how easily I understood the problem and how simple the solution should have looked to my students. 

When I was a young teacher I believed in strong classroom discipline and control, which meant to me, students should never correct the teacher in front of his class. (At this point all of the senior teachers in our group laughed, we had all at one point been wrong in our classes,  and had been corrected by our students.) 

One of my students, spoke up and said with conviction and quite strongly that the solution given to the math problem was wrong.  I gave the student a chance to change his mind, but the student was very strong in his assertion that I was wrong.

As he argued with me, I sensed that the class was getting out of control, so I said to the student although he was entitled to his opinion, in this case, the student had to accept my logic as I had proven the solution. However, the student continued to argue, so I had no choice but to put the student out of the class, to maintain order.

I had forgotten that it was raining hard, so I was surprised when about 20 minutes later the student knocked on the door, I opened the door and realised that he was very wet. So I talked to the student  and I asked him again if he was willing to accept that my solution was the correct one. He refused. I realised that I could not let him in so I let him get his jacket and he stayed outside for the period.

After class, I phoned the parents of the student and talked to them about their son's disrespectful behaviour in his class.  The students' father was quite upset with the son for his behaviour but more upset that his son had disrupted the class by knocking on the door later. (The fact his son was wet and cold had no bearing on what he did, the Dad said). The student came into class the next day and apologised to me.

The next day, in the Math staff room at lunch, I was talking about the incident and one of the other Math teachers asked me about the problem and what the solution I had suggested. I told her and she laughed and pointed out that I was wrong and the student was correct."

I asked what had reminded him of that story, my friend laughed and said that he had been reminded of the incident by the same student (10 years later). That student was a now a Science Teacher at a school in our district and they had met at a local pub with other friends. 

Another of my friends said. "You know that the new young Science teacher is probably telling that story to his friends but with a different perspective".

My friend said as a result of that incident he learned to accept that he was not always right and those things we do sometimes live for a long time. Good lessons for all of us who teach or have taught.