They'd come to understand this:
After all, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” --Albert Einstein or Matthew Kelly
Believe it or not I once had a teaching job. Not in a public school or a university but at a truck school where I trained truck drivers and occasionally truck mechanics. Most of my students had previously failed at everything they had ever done and most were probably not going to make it as truck drivers but it wasn't going to be because they didn't learn to drive the trucks. Not in my classes.
I quickly earned the reputation as being one of the two toughest instructors in the entire school. Students feared me coming in but like the other most feared instructor there I never wasted their time on things they didn't need and we both made sure that every day no matter how hard, it became was a small victory for every student we trained.
It didn't take long before I attracted the attention of the corporate headquarters. At the time they owned dozens of truck schools and had hundreds of instructors. And the final exam score averages of the students I trained were on average several points higher than any instructor in the history of the school including the instructors who had written the curriculum that I was supposed to be using but had tossed out early on in favor of my own.
Of course, it was decided that I must be helping my students cheat so the big wheels came down from corporate to administer the exams themselves. The results: My students scored even higher. But why not, they had already taken the test before.
But that wasn't good enough so the big wheels administered a different final exam telling me they would prove I was helping my students cheat. When the big wheels walked out of the exam room I knew the results by the looks on their faces: my students had scored even higher on the new test than the previous test.
They were ready to dismiss me simply because they were jealous of my results and when I presented them with a new training manual I had written in the hopes they might adopt it they were furious. Thankfully, the young lady who worked as the assistant to the CEO of the parent corporation that owned the truck schools had spent a few nights with me and when she caught wind of their plans the CEO called them all back to HQ where they could no longer bother me or my students.
You see, it had become a problem for them because trucking companies only wanted the highest scoring students and with all the highest scoring students coming from only one campus the other campuses were suffering in recruitment and placement.
A few months later we were issued a new training manual. It was word for word the same as I had written only the author's name was one of the big wheels. Legally there was nothing I could do as the manual was written on company time and was property of our employer but I'm happy that small victories became a way of helping those students move on to larger victories.
Now if Greensboro's leaders only cared... Then perhaps a few small victories would lead to bigger victories.
After all, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” --Albert Einstein or Matthew Kelly
Believe it or not I once had a teaching job. Not in a public school or a university but at a truck school where I trained truck drivers and occasionally truck mechanics. Most of my students had previously failed at everything they had ever done and most were probably not going to make it as truck drivers but it wasn't going to be because they didn't learn to drive the trucks. Not in my classes.
I quickly earned the reputation as being one of the two toughest instructors in the entire school. Students feared me coming in but like the other most feared instructor there I never wasted their time on things they didn't need and we both made sure that every day no matter how hard, it became was a small victory for every student we trained.
It didn't take long before I attracted the attention of the corporate headquarters. At the time they owned dozens of truck schools and had hundreds of instructors. And the final exam score averages of the students I trained were on average several points higher than any instructor in the history of the school including the instructors who had written the curriculum that I was supposed to be using but had tossed out early on in favor of my own.
Of course, it was decided that I must be helping my students cheat so the big wheels came down from corporate to administer the exams themselves. The results: My students scored even higher. But why not, they had already taken the test before.
But that wasn't good enough so the big wheels administered a different final exam telling me they would prove I was helping my students cheat. When the big wheels walked out of the exam room I knew the results by the looks on their faces: my students had scored even higher on the new test than the previous test.
They were ready to dismiss me simply because they were jealous of my results and when I presented them with a new training manual I had written in the hopes they might adopt it they were furious. Thankfully, the young lady who worked as the assistant to the CEO of the parent corporation that owned the truck schools had spent a few nights with me and when she caught wind of their plans the CEO called them all back to HQ where they could no longer bother me or my students.
You see, it had become a problem for them because trucking companies only wanted the highest scoring students and with all the highest scoring students coming from only one campus the other campuses were suffering in recruitment and placement.
A few months later we were issued a new training manual. It was word for word the same as I had written only the author's name was one of the big wheels. Legally there was nothing I could do as the manual was written on company time and was property of our employer but I'm happy that small victories became a way of helping those students move on to larger victories.
Now if Greensboro's leaders only cared... Then perhaps a few small victories would lead to bigger victories.
