Over the summer, a former student tracked me down on Facebook and sent me a note. I’d had an interesting relationship with the young man: at times, I felt he was very frustrated with the class. Indeed, he said as much. And he also said that very often, when he’d asked for help, I didn’t really help him. I thought about this for a moment, then realized that he wasn’t yet recognizing what I was trying to do. It’s something along the lines of the saying about giving people fish versus teaching them to fish.
The young man’s note included one of those compliments that feels a little like a backhanded insult. He wrote, “I want to thank you for being such a great teacher and making the class not extremely boring.” Apparently I was boring, just not extremely so. Yet the next few sentences simply set me to smiling:
You would help me sometimes and most of the time you didn’t, and I am glad you did that. I realized that I can’t be helped all the time and that I need to learn to do things on my own more often.
He closed by saying that I “made the class and literature enjoyable” for him, but that’s really of little significance compared to helping him develop self-reliance.
One of the things I love most about teaching eighth grade is the simple fact that I teach more than my subject content. I came to realize this fully the other day, when I received the third letter.
To be continued, again…