Clearing Things

Great to see an educator acknowledge that they learn from their students. I found it relatable despite never having been a teacher professionally. There is a lot that I have learned from people much younger and less experienced than me at work. They way they think about a problem, what stands out for them versus what does not can prove useful learning. The questions they would think to ask in meeting with a customer or a client may not be the ones I would ask and that could prove a lost opportunity. I enjoy being challenged about my approach to problem solving by someone who is only a few years out of college and without any "real-life" experience. Some of the best outcomes came out of those debates where I changed my mind.

I’m also thinking to the brilliant student in my fourth year of teaching who’d ask “What does this have to do with real life?”. She had a reputation for whining in the school, but I went home and reflected on it. Over the next few weeks, I decided to work on giving her access to the math. As she arrived at her “oh!” moments, she asked better questions and participated more. I learned to reframe “whining” and to re-ground myself in patience.

That one particularly reminds me of L who was very vocal about things not making sense and questioned why we insisted on going down a path when it was far from proven that it would work. L at the time was a newly minted employee fresh out of his senior year internship. I admired his courage to call things out. There were a couple of times in the year that he was on my team that I decided quickly that L knew better than the rest of us and that turned out to be the right call. To this day, I ask myself how L would respond to something and it help clear the cobwebs in my thinking.