As an expatriate teacher I often spend my summer holiday at least partly on trips to see people I’ve been away from. This summer’s visits included get-togethers, but it also included a reunion. A cousin of mine and her husband, whom I had last seen over twenty-five years ago, had settled in a ‘flyover city’ that I had carelessly flown over all these years. The business they started there became highly successful, but they recently decided to sell it and retire to a coastal place well known for its semi-rural charm.
During my last visit they had two very young children. Now both are grown. The second son, after graduating from a small liberal-arts college, found a job at the home office of a ‘tech giant’ not too far from his parents. Number one son turned away from academics to ‘work with his hands’. (Arabic-speakers, when someone’s manual artistry or labor has made their life easier or more worth living, call down a blessing on him: tislam eedak: blessings on your hands. We lack that appreciative expressiveness.)
The episode in his career that his father chose to relate to me was his tenure as a teacher at a sailing school for young people. The first thing to say is that a candidate couldn’t even start the sailing course if he or she couldn’t swim offshore and back or right a capsized little boat alone. The teachers would approach the candidate in the water and call out advice on righting if it was needed, but the candidate had to do something with the advice, and failure was a very real option.
Some of the children’s parents (and many of them were used to getting their way) would plead for admission if Junior failed, and sometimes even asked that the tasks be waived. Not a chance. Qualification was real, and Alex was expected to hold to the standards in the face of tears and countervailing pressure.
It was a good story, and nothing needed to be said about applicability to his teaching cousin’s work, but my cousin’s husband also had one bit of advice—maybe for me and maybe for my students. This highly successful entrepreneur said, ‘If there is one thing that a student should learn in order to prepare for a successful business career, it is how to write because in learning how to write, you learn how to think.’