Teaching is hard. But as hard as teaching is, I think being a student is harder.
Recently, I began reviewing my grad school textbooks and notes to consolidate them. (Yes, I realize how absolutely nerdy that makes me sound. I long ago accepted that I enjoy being a nerd.) As I reread the first chapter, I added, copied, and discarded notes from my original notebook. When I finished and compared my original notes and my new notes, they were completely different, and, sadly, the new set of notes (not the old set) actually reflected that I understood the material. The old set showed that I didn’t know what information was noteworthy. Even some of my definitions were wrong! I remembered how lost I had felt in those early classes, taking notes that (now) demonstrated how much I misunderstood. In teacher school, we were told that good teachers continue learning. At the time, I thought that meant that teachers kept learning about their subject and how to teach. When I started my masters, I realized that perhaps learning anything new helped me as a teacher because, as one of my students explained, then we understand a student’s perspective more. So, this summer, I’ve started learning a new language and remember anew what it feels like to be a student, to be the one in the room who doesn’t have the answers. When I struggle with a concept, my teacher assures me that I will understood it, much like I do for my students. But on my new side of the desk, I know how absolutely lost I am, and I wonder how my teacher can possibly think I’ll make progress. I get frustrated when I get answers wrong not because I didn’t understand the vocabulary words, but because I didn’t understand the question or the directions. I get overwhelmed when I see how much material I still have to learn and how little I have learned. I get discouraged when I miss the same question for the third time that lesson (something I sometimes wondered whether my students were doing on purpose). On the flip side, everything is new, so each word mastered is a major victory (unlike later, when full sentences or, gasp, paragraphs become the yardstick). So, yeah, teaching is hard. But the struggling of learning is perhaps harder.
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My first job, Donut World, was my best. And although I have worked at many other places since then, I still expect business to follow the principles that my first boss demonstrated. And every time I am reminded that the business world is not like Donut World, I am startled anew by the difference.
Rule 1: We are Family. As long as we worked well and hard, the store owner Avi treated us like family. When we returned after a semester at college or even vacation, he would greet us with open arms, saying, “Ah, my family is back.” On my first day at Donut World, one of my father’s friends came in for his usual donut and coffee on his way to work. As a brand new member of the Donut World family, I sensed Avi’s fatherly concern as this burly man greeted me warmly. He didn’t relax until I explained that I knew this man from church. Our customers were also part of the family. We knew about each other’s lives and truly cared about each other’s lives. When a co-worker died, Avi wasn’t able to tell me before Shabbat started, so he asked one of our regular customers to stop by the store to tell me the news in person. Similarly, when I graduated from high school, customers and employees alike celebrated that milestone with me with gifts, cards, well-wishes. Avi even blessed me before I left for college. Rule 2: Hard work is rewarded. My sister warned me that at some point during my first day at work, she, Avi, and Georgia (the store manager) would disappear into the backroom on the pretense that they needed to check things in the stock room. What they were really doing was watching me on the camera to see what I did without supervision. I wiped down already clean counters. I checked what needed to be restocked. I started to memorize the menu board. At the end of the day, I already had a pay raise. Avi didn’t give annual pay raises; he rewarded hard work with surprise pay raises and just-because bonuses. (Corporate America with its ten-cent annual raises would learn well from Avi’s method. Why work hard when you are only ever rewarded for surviving another year?) The other rules build on those two rules. Rule 3: How you behave determines how you are treated. If customers didn’t behaved nicely and threatened to take their business elsewhere, Avi sniffed and waved them away, telling us that “we don’t want that kind here.” And even if they became regular customers, they were never part of the family. They didn’t get special treatment by complaining and being rude; in fact, Avi regularly called the police to have those customers removed from the premises. It’s amazing how quickly bullies back down when authority arrives. Rule 4: Serving others is serving yourself. This last rule is really the summary of all of Avi’s business principles and an idea that has been playing in my mind for a while now as I wrestle with Corporate America’s dehumanizing way of structuring business. Working at my current company, a corporate cookie-cutter business whose heads couldn’t care less about the employees on the front lines, has made me realize this rule. My previous manager at this store ran the store into the ground by mishandling funds and helping only high-dollar customers. He paid us just above minimum wage and would steal any commissionable sale from us. By serving himself (and no one else), he lost valuable employees, regular, loyal customers, the community’s good opinions, and ultimately the store. The new manager follows Avi’s rules (as much as corporate bigwigs let him) and serves others, and in doing so, has salvaged the store, gained a positive name in the community, built a loyal customer base, and turned the customers and employees into a family. Hmm, serving others really is the best policy. As a language teacher, I spend so much time emphasizing the importance of using words so that the audience clearly knows the ideas in the author’s mind. And then I go to work at my part-time jobs and realize I just might be wasting my breath.
“Hello, this is Eleanor at Music World,” I say, using the official company script for answering the phone. A mumbling voice on the other end of the line says, “A cup holder on a music stand.” Uncertain what that code means, I ask, “I’m sorry. How can I help you?” “Do you have a cup holder that latches onto a music stand in stock?” Wouldn’t it have been more efficient to have asked that to begin with? Usually these phone calls end just as uncertainly as they start. “No, I’m sorry. We don’t have that in stock. We can get it in for you, though,” I say. “Okay.” I’ve learned that in modern business phone etiquette “okay” means “thank you. Good-bye.” Things get more confusing when I answer the phone, and the customer says, “You just called me.” That’s it. No name. No reference to the voicemail left for them. And I wasn’t the one who called them. When asked what my associate had called them about, the customer admits that she didn’t even bother to listen to the voicemail left for her. So I get stuck playing twenty questions: “Do you have a rental account with us?” “No.” “Do you take lessons with us?” “No.” A huge part of me wants to say, “Listen to the voicemail if you want to know why someone called you!” In high school when I worked at Donut World, it was even worse. Fully literate adults would stand in front of a donut case holding forty different kinds of donuts and request “that one.” Then they made me play a guessing game. “Which donut?” “The one on the second rack.” The second from the top or bottom? From the left from the right? That still only narrows it down to eight flavors. “The one with the white powder on the outside and the white cream on the inside.” “Oh, you want a vanilla cream donut,” I would say to model using words to communicate. “Yeah, with the white powder,” they would say, ignoring my cue. Those are usually the people who make picking a dozen donuts seem like an entire shift. And they teach their children to do the same thing. “Johnny, what kind of donut do you want?” After their child stares at the overwhelming choices for a few seconds, they start pointing at “that one” or “that one.” It takes more work to describe the donut than it does to read the label. Even stranger are the ones who will read every part of the label to me, except for the name. “Could I try this ice cream?” “Which kind?” “The ‘creamy vanilla ice cream with a ribbon of caramel syrup and pecan pralines.’” “Oh, the Pralines and Cream?” “I guess so.” Why do we work so hard for high literacy rates when the general population refuses to read even once they’ve learned? |
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