The Best Worst Teacher

“Kids, today, I swear,” my colleague said, shaking his head and putting both hands around his coffee cup.

After school, we’d meet in the English Department office for our daily “Angst Catharsis,” and review the day’s triumphs and catastrophes before returning to our respective classrooms for final lesson planning and/or grading.

I also had a puzzling story about students to tell my friend, but I gave him the floor first.

“It’s first period,” he said looking up. “I think I’m ready for anything, but in walks a girl with a sour face and wet eyes. When I walk over to her desk, she turns away. I ask, ‘Is there anything wrong?’ And she sniffles and shakes her head no.”

He shrugs at me. “What am I supposed to do? It’s none of my business.”

“But she’s obviously out of sorts,” I put in.

“Exactly.” He shrugged again. “So I go on with the lesson, and she continues to whimper and carry on until, finally, when the class is writing in their journals, I ask her to step into the hall. I go into an apologetic explanation that I don’t need to know the details of her life and why she’s upset, but I want to be helpful and suggested she may want to go to the counseling office.”

“Makes sense.”

“You know what it was?” He said, astonished. “She was crying out of admiration for her friend who found a kitten left in a paper bag and took her home to be rescued. They were tears of joy!”

We both smiled. I was relieved it wasn’t anything serious.

“Here’s my puzzler for you,” I said. “One student – I’ll call him Jack – comes up to me at the end of class and tells me, “Mr. Harrison, you’re the best teacher at Audubon High School.”

“That’s great!” my colleague said.

“Yeah, I was feeling pretty good about it. Jack went into how I found some problems with his rough draft and explained how he could improve it in a way he understood. Then, as each day passed, Jack said I encouraged him to show me his progress, and he felt that now he can write papers so much better than he could before. That he no longer fears written assignments.”

“That’s so cool, Mark,” my colleague gushed.

“So then after school, another student – Jill – comes to see me about the low grade she got on her paper. I pointed out a comment and gave examples how it could have been better with more specific evidence and explanation, the same lesson I taught everyone, including Jack.”

My friend nodded.

“Jill wails at me that she can’t afford a ‘B’ in the course, and that she put in hours and hours of homework, and that other English teachers she’s had have told her that she’s a wonderful writer and so on and so forth. And do you know what her final conclusion was?”

“What?”

“She said, ‘Mr. Harrison, you’re the worst teacher at Audubon High School’.”

My colleague laughed. “And these two are from the same class?”

I nodded.

He laughed again.

“It was good for me to realize,” I said. “That they’re both right. I was effective in teaching Jack how to learn but ineffective in getting it across to Jill.”

My colleague said, “I wouldn’t put it all on your shoulders. What all kids have to realize is that we’re not actually the teachers. Ultimately, their lives will work out the sooner they realize that they are their own teachers. It’s their job to learn how to learn.”

“And we can help them get it.”

“Of course.”