19 Dec A Lesson Learnt

Two of her former students teach Martha Wegner a bit about what is important in life.

I had dinner last night with some old friends. Actually, I was the old one, they were the friends. I am now old enough to have dinner with my former Year 4 students. They called me by my first name, and I didn’t even think of telling them to sit down, raise their hands, or hand in their assignments.

This meeting came about after I happened to run into one of these students, Leah. Over the years, we had kept in touch sporadically, a Christmas card here, an email there. We got talking, and she wondered if I might like to join her and Luke, another former student, for dinner. Well, why not? Old students talking over old times with their favourite teacher.

As I walked up to the restaurant that night, I could see Luke. I couldn’t see his face, but there was no mistaking the profile of the boy, now the man. The same posture, same stance, the same restless hands. When I approached him, he smiled, said “Hi”, and hugged me – a stiff embrace, really. After all, how do you hug your teacher? The little boy was gone, and in his place was a personable 19-year-old man. After some self-conscious, somewhat stilted conversation, Leah arrived, looking beautiful and oh-so-adult. We were seated at our table, and the conversation flowed fairly easily, with a few pauses and bumps in the road.

These young people amazed me. Luke was putting himself through university. Leah had considered studying overseas but didn’t know if she could leave her recently divorced mother and little sister for that amount of time. Luke advises his mother to quit her job – she hates it- and he encourages her to move on. Leah didn’t want to see her dad; she was so angry with him, but she knew that she might be making a really big mistake down the road if she didn’t see him. I listened. And I silently marvelled. How did this happen? How did they get to the point of adulthood when they were not only responsible for themselves but for the people around them?

Then Luke looked at me and said, “You know, I’m still awful at maths. I only just got a pass in my uni course.” I wanted to embrace this young man and tell him that it didn’t matter that he wasn’t good at maths. What mattered was the fine person he was and the fine person he had turned out to be. I wanted to tell him that maths didn’t determine the character of a person. But of course I didn’t. So now I write it.

Next week, my son and I will argue about him having toast for dinner instead of the meal I spent hours cooking, an argument that exhausts and angers me. My daughter will bring home her maths test for me to explain, and again, she won’t understand because she is not good at maths. But, from now on, I will look at my son and know that he will turn out to be a fine young man (even if he is raised only on bread), and I will look at my daughter and know she will turn out to be a wonderful person: she already is because maths doesn’t matter. It really is the person inside that matters—quite a lesson for an old person like me.

Illustration by Gregory Roberts