Ask questions and listen before passing judgment

My friends and I were talking about responsibility and how we did our best to instil this into the young minds that we had the opportunity to serve when we were teaching.

One of my friends related the story of when he was teaching in a small interior town and coaching basketball. His team was playing in the semi-finals of the season on a cold, wintry, early Saturday morning game. If his team won the game,  they would be in the regional playoffs for the BC championships. So on the Friday night after the game, he held a meeting and talked about responsibility and making sure that everyone should get enough sleep and show up full of energy in the morning. Everyone on the team was pumped and they were all there in the morning except for his star defenceman. 

The young man lived about 30 miles outside of town and had no phone, so my friend had no way of knowing what had happened to the player. The first half was a very tight game, and my friend's team was down by a couple of points at the end of the first half.  The star defensive player showed up just before the half. At the break, my friend who was very upset took the player aside and gave him holy hell for letting the team down and not showing up in time. My friend did not give the young man a chance to explain, and then told the player to get dressed. The young man played the second half. My friend's team won the game by a very close margin.

After the game, the defenseman came and apologised to my friend who by then had calmed down. So my friend asked the boy what had happened. The young man replied, "Everyone at home had gotten drunk on Friday night and there was no one available to drive him into the game". The young man went on to explain that rather than let the team down, he had run into town in the cold, wearing only a light jacket, which my friend had not noticed when the boy had first shown up.

My friend said, there was no need to teach this young man responsibility, as he had it in spades, but what he learned as a teacher was to ask questions and listen to explanations before passing judgment. A good lesson for a new teacher to learn early in his career.