Saying Thank You #1

It is easy to overlook the importance of going out of your way to say "Thank you." I'm thinking about this because an adult upgrading student of mine called just to talk. We hadn't talked since I moved to a new job 34-35 years ago. She went on to become a teacher's aid. One good thing about being in adult education is that the students tend to remember you and do come back to tell you how they are doing. And how you changed their lives.


Back in my days as a data processing instructor, I had a retail marketing student in my Introduction to Data Processing class. She had straight "A"s since kindergarten until I gave her her first "B". [The fact that she was the daughter-in-law-to-be of my wife's best friend helped insure that I knew all the facts.] As she later admitted, she couldn't see any use in learning to design a database for a marketer.


Every year following her graduation until I moved on to a new job she returned to my class to tell my students about her first retail job: which included designing an inventory database. She said that it was her way of saying thank you for forcing her to learn something she didn't want to learn.

📒 📓 📔 📕 📗 📘 📙

I have been lucky because I've had a lot of students make contact with me after graduation. I think that I will share more of these; not because I think that I'm a great teacher, I'm not (or maybe I think most teachers are great teachers) but to encourage other teachers who don't teach adults.