During the gold rush, a miner spent months digging through an area of land where he believed he would find gold. After several futile attempts he finally gave up and sold the land and his tools to another miner. “I could’ve let you have this land for a kobo,” he told his buyer, “It’s useless.”
The new owner spent a couple of days observing the land🤔💭 and pondering what to do with it. Then he called an engineer to survey the land with him. The engineer examined the land with sensors and showed the new miner exactly where to dig for gold. Surprisingly, it turned out to be the exact spot where the previous miner had dug. What’s even more surprising is that the new miner only dug three feet and struck a vast supply of gold.
What does this story have to do with you? I can think of 4 things. If you can think of more, please share in the comments section.🗣
1. There’s a difference between instinct and intelligence. Know when to leverage each for your good. Teachers tend to rely more on instincts and their years of experience than on data-proven techniques to create remarkable teaching and learning experiences for themselves and their learners. Supplement your experience with new tools to achieve smarter and faster results. Just like the new miner who employed the engineer’s sensors. Even though the sensors led him right back to where the previous miner had started digging, the new miner approached his digging venture with more confidence. I am pretty sure that he could have dug more depths than the old miner if it was required. The old miner’s instinct was not wrong✅, but it is easier to give up when you are not sure. Modern tools offer intelligence that help you to be sure that the strategies you employ work. Veteran teachers must therefore take a cue from this and learn to employ modern teaching pedagogies and tools.
2. Don’t go it alone. Become interdependent. Realise that there are certain things you cannot do alone and certain results you cannot achieve unless you employ the skill of some other people. Employ the strengths of other colleagues. Collaborate smarter.🤼
3. Don’t let your inner circle be made of only people of your profession. Just as the miner needed an engineer, you need a IT expert, a doctor, a banker… and if you’re in Lagos, you should consider having a friend in LASTMA office too🤣. Teachers should be like bees, who pull nectar from various flowers to produce something sweet like honey. You need to know a little about everything and everything about one thing to give your students a wholesome learning experience.
4. No profession is easy, yet there is no profession on earth that is meant for the poor, and none for the rich. There is no guarantee that everyone in IT or manufacturing will become a Bill Gates or Aliko Dangote. Neither is there a spell cast upon teachers to make them poor. We each write our own stories and chart our own paths. The very place where some have failed and have sour stories to tell can be the exact place where you strike gold and become an overnight success. All you have to do is see each situation differently, think differently, act differently and you’ll generate a different kind of result.
Too many teachers play the victim card or blame their lot in life on the ‘attitude’ of others toward the profession. Granted, I have met quite a few people who condescend to teachers.🙄 Yet I have known more than a few teachers, me included, who cannot be minimised. We don’t live on alms. We don’t thrive on gifts from parents and we don’t insinuate a tip. We work hard for our money and to achieve success, just as hard as anyone with a good head does. We will not let the situation of things in the country or our salary cause us to grumble like helpless people. The thicker the darkness, the more relevant our light – no matter how dim it may seem.
So, bend your back and get digging, but this time, do it differently than you’ve ever done before. Stay at it. When your success arrives, nothing like SAPA or JAPA will be in your radar (anymore).
Thank you for reading. Share this article with any teacher you know.
Got questions? Do you need advice or have a story/experience to share? Pour your thoughts in the comments box. Let’s create a family on this page. Or you can email me privately via leke@penspeakers.com.