My Student Taught Me A Lesson

The story is told of a doctor who got up to speak at a medical conference. As he approached the podium, he realized, to his horror, that he was unable to read his own handwritten notes. He looked around the room, coughed nervously, and asked, “Is there a pharmacist in the house?”

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As a teacher, I try to give my students the benefit of the doubt.

When grading tests, I am often faced first with the challenge of deciphering a student’s handwriting, then trying to decode what the student actually meant, and finally, if and how it answers the question I asked.

At times, I must ask myself: Did the student misunderstand what I asked? Perhaps they had difficulty transposing their knowledge into written words? Were they answering another question on the wrong line? Or, did they simply not know the material?

Recently, on a Navi test, I asked what brought Dovid to Shaul Hamelech’s palace in the first place. One student wrote: It is on the other side.

This cryptic statement certainly did not answer the question I had asked. What was "it"? I searched the rest of his test paper for clues, and then turned the page over. There, “on the other side”, he had written that Dovid had been invited to play the harp, to help raise Shaul’s spirits.

Oh.

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In this week’s Parsha, Shelach, the spies misunderstand events that were created for their own advantage, and present them as threats (see Rashi, Bamidbar 13:32).

Every day, we interact with other people.

Often, people say or do things that might “rub us the wrong way”. They seem to be just plain wrong, or, at best, completely incoherent, irrelevant, and out of place.

We would do well to remember the lesson my student taught me that day. To find the answer, we may have to turn over the page, and look at the other side.

If we pause for a moment (before clicking on the reply or send button), and think it through, we may find a better way of understanding what they really meant (hopefully it doesn’t turn out to be worse than what you first understood it to mean).

Sometimes the answer is simply on the other side.

We owe it to ourselves, and the other, to at least look for it. Hopefully, we find it.

Shabbat Shalom.

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