Seniors realize there are no answers, only stories

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.” ― Virginia Woolf

We were sitting after golf and the conversation drifted around to how we had learned our craft, (most of us the hard way). One of my younger friends told his story.

I was instructing my Math 10 students in my portable on a rather stormy and rainy day. As I was laying out my solution on the board, to the 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. Now as a beginning teacher I believed in strong classroom discipline and control, which meant to that students should not correct me when I was teaching.

One of my students spoke up and said quite strongly that the solution I had given on the board was wrong. I was shocked but I gave the student a chance to change his mind, but the student was very strong in his assertion that I was wrong. Sensing that the class was getting out of control, I said to the student that he was entitled to his opinion, but in this case, he had to accept my logic and solution to the problem.

He continued to argue, so I had no choice but to put him out of the class, to maintain order. It was raining hard, so about 20 minutes later when the student knocked on the door I  opened the door and talked to him asking if he was willing to accept my solution, he still refused, but since it was raining hard, I allowed him to get his jacket and he stayed outside for the period.

Immediately after class, I phoned his parents and talked to them about their son's disrespectful behavior in my class. The father was quite upset with the son for his behavior but was more upset that his son had disrupted the class by knocking on the door later, (The fact the son was wet and cold had no bearing on this the Dad said). The student came into class the next day and apologized to me.

At lunch the next day, after the student had apologized, I was in the Math staff room at lunch, and I was talking about the issue with the student; one of the other Math teachers asked me about the problem and about the solution I had given to the class, and what solution the student has 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, "I was reminded of the incident by the same student 10 years later. The student had become a Science Teacher in our district and I saw him at the pub and he reminded me of the time I had kicked him out of my class". 

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

I asked my friend what he had learned from this experience and he said, "I learned that I was not always correct and that I had to accept that I was not always correct". 

He said, "I also learned that the little things we do live for a long time".