I recently received a DM from a former student informing me that he and his friend had reported him to his first-year class leader for calling me a name that was hardly a term of endearment.
“You were wrong,” he wrote. “I didn’t call you that.” It was so rare that I tried to convey discipline in a classroom that I immediately remembered the incident. Because I can honestly count on one hand the number of times I’ve accomplished something.
Some parents and teachers may think they are virtually infallible, but when it comes to providing eyewitness accounts of pranks, I always say, “I could be wrong here, but…” I am a person whose starting point is “But.”
So if I had been convinced that I had been called a bad name, I would have considered it irrefutable.
According to my interpretation, the fact that this person sent me a DM 7 years after the fact definitely supports his claim that he is innocent of the charges leveled against him in the first year. It will become a thing.
Even though I was completely convinced in that moment that I had heard what I thought, my interpretation was most likely completely wrong and reading his message didn’t make me feel any better. That would be a lie. I crouched down on the carpet with my old smugness and grimaced.
He didn’t offer any evidence as to why my decision was wrong, but the fact that he took this long to contact me after the fact shows that I… That would suggest that I was wrong.
I remembered this incident because it was unusual for me to report something to someone higher up the food chain in the classroom.
I remember that too because of his mother’s reaction. Many parents would argue that they can’t do that to their child, but this mother supported me 100%.
She made it clear that such behavior was unacceptable.
Reading this message seven years later reminds me that as parents and teachers, our words matter.
Every action we take in a young person’s life can have consequences far beyond our imagination. That’s why we always strive to say and do the right things.
But the reality is that as adults, we will make mistakes and make bad choices, but what matters is how we respond to our gaffes.
I always apologize to my 4-year-old son, Ted, when I get impatient or in a bad mood. And I don’t know if that’s the right way or the wrong way.
Still, I don’t think it makes sense to pretend to be infallible when we almost never know the dates with precision, let alone the chronology of events that led to the mysterious spilling of a two-liter milk carton .
Similarly, part of our responsibility as parents may be to prepare our children for the fact that adults make mistakes and their inevitability.
Perhaps part of being a parent is teaching your children how to respond to other people’s gaffes, and even being a teacher, offering reprieve to those who make mistakes.
I vowed that I would never be the kind of parent who automatically takes the side of my child no matter the situation.
At the end of the day, I would like to advocate to anyone who will listen that school is there to build resilience and prepare you for the real world, where things don’t always go your way.
I’d like to say I’ve gained this perspective because I came from a school with a tough life, but it was inspired by Fiona, an inspirational PE teacher who captained the Irish rugby team and competed in world championships. I learned this by osmosis from sharing a staff room with Corcoran. Cup final.
To be fair, this was also the same year I dislocated my arm while wearing a coat, so she wasn’t the only one with a sports injury.
But the older I get, the more I realize that all the hard work I did as a young teacher to appease doting parents wasn’t helping me or my children in the long run. Now I know what happened.
The reality is that young people’s lives are not always smooth sailing, and by overprotecting them, we are failing to meet our obligations to prepare them for NCT tests and direct debits.
I now know what that mother was doing all those years ago when she automatically had my back, no questions asked.
She was trying to prepare her son for the real world, a world where people sometimes get things wrong and where he has no choice but to accept people’s mistakes.
Already, parents are testing whether I’m Swiss when it comes to children on the playground. That’s how it feels when Ted picks up an abandoned toy car himself, or when he finds Spider-Man’s bag, which would suit him better than its current owner.
Of course, when these parents point out the obvious point: that Ted’s fun personality doesn’t exempt him from respecting my cardinal rules and yours, my immediate reaction is exasperation. .
But then I remembered that Ted is made up of me and his father, neither of whom are perfect (despite the latter’s claims), so he is sometimes wrong.
He does, although not often. And when that happens, it’s about supporting him, but only if it helps him, not if it concerns an interest in F1. Because no one can be neutral in this matter.
