Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Former Students

You never really know how your work in the classroom will affect your life outside in the community. Consequently, there is a certain amount of diplomacy involved with teaching. I’m proud that I can’t think of a single student that I would not want to run into outside of school, and that I don’t really harbor any guilt from any of the students I have taught.


We had a funny little reminder of this last Saturday night. My bride and I had just played taxi to a fellow participant’s students, and on our way back, decided to meet some friends for pizza. The restaurant we went to is an eclectic and vibrant spot that serves fairly gourmet pizza (especially for the Delta). One of my former students works at this place. Though we had our occasional issue last year, we have remained friends since his time in my classroom. He went off to a community college for a bit, but shortly returned home citing “boredom” as his reason for returning. He now works as at this place and is taking classes at the local community college.


We’ve joked from time to time about his ability to serve me beer at the restaurant, but we’ve never actually acted out situation. When we went to the pizzeria on Saturday, it was a fairly busy night and we were in a larger group of people. I waited in line, put in my order (without any beer), and grabbed my table number like any other customer in line. We found a table and conversed for a while, not anticipating anything out of the ordinary at all. After about 15 minutes, the first party in our group received their pizza. After about 18, the second came. I ordered last, so I didn’t think anything of it, and we continued to wait patiently. 25 minutes came, we were still pizza-less. “Please go ahead and eat” we said to the other members of our party. They were the picture of an etiquette stalwart, and refused to touch their steamy pies without ours in place. And we waited, and waited. We started noticing others who had ordered after us receive their pizza. Then we noticed people who arrived after we sat down began receiving their pizza. I hated to believe it, but the writing was on the wall - they had lost our order. This was a tricky situation, again because my former student and friend was the point person for this. Do I demand a refund? Do we wait longer? Again, he’s a friend so it was a somewhat tricky situation. I approached him, asked if he could check on our order, he did so quickly, then came back with an embarrassed look on his face.


“What was your order?”, he asked, I told him, then he went back to the kitchen in a hurry, barking orders and hurriedly shuffling pizzas around. I knew he had a lot going on, so I didn’t want to push the issue at all and returned back to my table. About 10 minutes later, my former student rushed to our table with our pizza. It was bigger than the size we ordered, a nice gesture I appreciated. I figured that was the end of it, thanked him for his help, and began devouring. About ten minutes later, our dinner was interrupted again by an enormous desert pizza, and the beer we had been joking about for the past year. Again, not part of our order, just a nice gesture from a former student, now friend.


I’ll never fully know the impact I’ve had on this guy, or really on of my students. This was, if nothing else, a fun reminder of the relationships that can and do blossom from my time as a teacher.