"What kind of teachers did you have?" she snapped. "Don't you know that you're supposed to put your thumb and middle finger into the handle loops of those scissors, and stretch your pointer finger straight out beside the blades in the direction you want to cut? You have your thumb and pointer in the handles!"
So the scissor grip was the opposite of the pencil grip. God knows how I got them backward, back there in 1941, but for the next thirty-plus years I managed both pencil and scissors pretty well despite incorrect gripping. However, conscious of my position as role model (and still terrified of the teacher), I made the corrections. It took a long time before I was comfortable with them, never mind proficient, and 25 years later when I retired from teaching, my pencil position lapsed gratefully back to incorrect status.
Sometimes corrections can be truly useful. After I became the lead teacher, I was given a teaching intern to supervise. In our school, interns were not student teachers who had majored in education and were trying their wings, but college graduates who had not majored in education but thought they might like teaching. We took them into our classrooms for a year, a process helpful to them in making up their minds about teaching, and certainly helpful to us in terms of their energy, youth, and enthusiasm, never mind having an extra pair of hands to help out with the work.
We also learned a lot from those interns. One year, we had in our class a little boy who came to us in frustration, saying: "My shoes won't stay tied. Can you fix them?"
"Of course you can't keep them tied," the intern said. "They're not tied with a square knot."
"How can you tell that?" I asked.
"Look at the bow," she said. "It's sitting on an angle. If it were a square knot, the bow would be sitting at right angles to the tongue."
"Well," I said, thinking to make the child feel better, "I can't ever keep my shoes tied either." We all looked down. There sat the bows, slantwise atop each of my shoes. Somehow, when my mother taught me how to tie, I got it wrong, and nobody had ever noticed. The simple solution was to go in the opposite direction as I passed the free lace around the loop. Voila! The bow lay neatly athwart my shoe.
But just imagine trying to remember to reverse one direction in the automatic process of tying your shoe, after 60 years of mis-direction! That was one trick that this old dog really had to fight to learn. It was worth the effort, though: nowadays my shoes stay tied.
Teaching is a profession that keeps you humble because it's perfectly possible to learn as much from your students as they learn from you (even if they are only five years old). But it's life itself that is the great teacher, for old dogs as well as for the young. Just ask anyone who has had to unravel the intricacies of Medicare or retirement plans: if that's not learning new tricks, I don't know what is. For that matter, ask anyone who has had to learn how to be a good mother-in-law (dicey, but worth it); a grandmother (different from parenting, but also thrilling); or the spouse of a recently retired male who wants only to sit in the house and sulk (not a fun learn, I'm told). Or ask a single person who has had to take on the financial, physical, and emotional planning for retirement years, solo. You learn to cope with these challenging new tricks, the joyous as well as the depressing, because life has handed them to you and refusal isn't an option.
And for anyone over 50 who reads this column, congratulations: you've become computer literate, a big-time new trick, and probably don't need any of the above information!
©Julia Sneden for SeniorWomen.com
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