Having worked as a teacher for many years, I am always interested in comments and anecdotes about teaching...
Recently I came across two that have made me pause and reflect...
One was about Martin Luther, the religious reformer who, 500 years ago, greatly impacted the course of European history. As a lad, Martin Luther had a teacher who would ceremoniously bow when he entered the classroom every morning.
When asked why he did this, the teacher replied: You never know what one of these students may some day become...
So I wonder: Does expecting greatness foster it...?
(But I also remember the words of a colleague, when I - still young and single - asked her whether being a teacher made her a better parent... She smiled, and replied: The greatest shock to me as a parent was to discover that my little budding genius was really only an average student...! So much for parental objectivity!)
The second idea I've been mulling around in my mind came from a well-known speaker, commenting on our reluctance to accept God's grace and love. Are many of us are harder on ourselves than we should be, he asked, because we were taught, at an early age (by our teachers) to focus on errors and not on what we have done right?
Most teachers do mark the wrong answers, not the right ones, so - from an early age - does a page full of X's make us feel like failures? And does this sense of failure follow us throughout our life?
So again I wonder: Does drawing attention to what we are doing wrong teach us to be harder on ourselves than we should?
Looking back, I sometimes did only mark the wrong answers (in cases where there was a clear right or wrong) because there were generally fewer of them... So it was easier... However, if a student was struggling and most of the answers were wrong, I would then only mark the correct ones, to encourage the student on...
But now I wonder: Did all the X's of my long teaching career destroy many a student's self-esteem?
I hope not! But I wonder...
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