This week I taught a class in Christian theology. All day, 5 days in a row. I thought I had it rough.
One of my students was legally blind. His name is Tom. He has partial vision in one eye, and uses a special device to read the copies of my lecture notes I printed out for him. The scanner blew every word up to about a million-point font on his TV monitor. Inverting the black and white to make it easier for him to see. Imagine trying to read a book on your Kindle where only 2 words filled the entire screen and that will give you a picture.
Tom did his reading, answered questions well, participated cheerfully in every group activity, and didn’t complain once, even when I would forget to include something in my handout and he missed out on seeing some of the content. He was on time and prepared every day.
When Tom took the final exam, I went in to check on him in the computer lab and saw him hunched with his face nearly against the monitor as he typed. I could see that there were tons of spelling errors in his answers. But I didn’t say anything. I just texted my TA and reminded him to take this into account in grading the exam. Then, before he finished the exam, Tom proofed all the questions, making the necessary corrections. Even though he had extra time to complete the exam, he finished it in the same time as everyone else.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is a desire to learn.
I was utterly humbled by Tom’s effort. There is no way that I, or anyone else in the class worked as hard, proportionally speaking, as Tom did to learn the same content.
Sometimes I can feel a little disappointed by the lack of effort some students put into learning topics I care deeply about. But the next time I teach a class I am just going to think about Tom’s face inches from the computer monitor, carefully typing and editing answers to questions I wrote. From here on out, I’ll make sure that everything I teach is worth that kind of effort.
