#05 He Taught Us Nothing!
A group of former students met at a school reunion and informed my wife about my alleged teaching - was I caught on the wrong foot?
“Ma’am, we have to tell you that your husband taught us nothing!”
In the presence of a whole bunch of former students and their wives and girlfriends, this was not the kind of introduction I was expecting my wife to hear. The Annual School Reunion includes former students, teachers past and present, their better halves with a total attendance of over a thousand people. Fortunately, there’s enough loud music and liquid distraction to keep everyone engaged across the venue, so that voluble claims such as the one made by T above would be quickly dissipated. My wife, on the other hand, being a teacher herself, was quick to pick up on this and prick up her ears for more juicy gossip while I quietly died a few internal deaths. Was my past coming back to haunt me? An inebriated crowd of former students plucking up the courage to get back at their teacher?
As I ran my eye over the group that had suddenly gone very silent, I noticed that a bunch of them, most in fact, were visibly prosperous. Some had gone from ‘portrait’ to ‘landscape’, especially around the waist. Others sported their wealth in subtle ways through their clothing and accessories. They hadn’t done badly in life, had they? Some giggled nervously, the ones that still called me “Sir”; some laughed knowingly with a wink, the ones who used my first name or backslapped me.
Good old T continued, “Not only did he not teach us, he made us learn things on our own. He put us into groups and gave us problems to solve while lounging about at the back of the classroom himself”. This was beginning to sound familiar. Yes, I strongly believed that the students in the higher classes could actually learn everything on their own if they got sufficiently motivating projects to engage with. So, in my defense, this wasn’t so bad. My ears started regaining their original colour from the beetroot they had resembled a minute ago.
Then T started introducing the assembled group. “This is S, he’s the Managing Director of his company; this is R, he is a sought-after advocate, top of his profession; next to him is P who handles the entire Eastern Region business of company ABC, …” This went on around the circle, and then T ended with a line I shall never forget. He said, “And I believe we are all here today because he didn’t teach us. Because he helped us to learn on our own.”
Watching my wife’s confusion and dawning understanding of what went down, I realized that probably the greatest teaching moment for these students was when they were given their space and allowed to learn. Yes, there were the moments of instruction. Yes, there were assessments. Yes, there was a “syllabus to be covered” or, in my favourite phrase, a syllabus to be uncovered. But driving all this was the need to achieve a different set of learning outcomes - helping learners to help themselves.
If you have had moments of lifelong learning like this, please leave a comment. If you want to hear more about this method of teaching, please leave a query.
A good lesson to learn. Teaching someone is a skill in itself, but teaching someone how to learn and discover on their own is teaching at another level. While it looks easy, it is much harder. But the payoff lasts a lifetime for the student.
Sir, I still call you Sir because I consider you one of the three best teachers I've been privileged to have had. I don't know if it's appropriate to say this here, but the other two are Ms Peterson, and Mr Gass. Thank you for opening my mind to knowledge as opposed to filling it with a lot useless facts and dates that I never never had any use for later in life.