One hundred years ago, the French author Anatole France won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He practically grew up in his father’s bookstore and attended an elite school. Even with those influences, he once said, “Nine-tenths of education is encouragement.”
Could that be true? I had taken martial arts classes in college, but I didn’t really get into the martial arts heavily until I met my martial arts mentor, Mr. Kenneth Daniel. I noticed that I had a harder time learning new techniques and forms than most people. It just didn’t come naturally to me, and I wondered if I would ever be any good at it. Mr. Daniel must have picked up on it because he explained to me about his journey. He explained he was the worst clutz in his class, but he outworked everyone else and became a master. Several years and a couple of black belts later, he would turn his classes over to me and my friend Ricky. I wonder if it would have happened had Mr. Daniel not been an encourager. As the newsman, Dan Rather once said, “The dream begins, most of the time, with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you on to the next plateau.”
That brings me to the tale of two teachers I had as a child.
In the fifth grade, I had a very young teacher. It could have been her first year. I’ve never been one to want to be on stage. Being in front of a large group of people for any reason has always been something to avoid. But, I was required to be a part of the Thanksgiving program by this young teacher, and I couldn’t get out of it. The teacher decided I would make a good Indian. I didn’t want to be an Indian. Nobody wanted to be an Indian. Now I don’t remember what I and another ‘Indian’ did, but we both got chewed out for “ruining the Thanksgiving program.” Yes, I ruined Thanksgiving…at least that year. Not that I needed any reminders, but that further etched in my mind that nothing good could come from being on a stage in front of a lot of people.
A couple of years before that, my teacher was Ms. Amy Hooten. In those days, report cards for elementary students were given a grade in a handful of subjects every nine weeks. The goal was to get an ‘S’ for satisfactory in all the boxes. You were given the card in a rigid cardboard-like envelope that the card would slip into. You had to take it home and get a parent’s signature on it. I would always check for the ‘S’s, breathe a sigh of relief, and that was it. However, on one of those grading periods, Ms. Amy Hooten had written, “Donnie is a wiz in mathematics.” What the heck is a wiz? My mother explained that it meant you were very good at something, short for a wizard. Wow! Do you know what that does for a child? Now I almost certainly had an aptitude for math anyway, but that nudged me more into a love for it. In college, I didn’t major in math, but almost all my electives were in math.
You don’t have to be a teacher to be an encourager. It’s something for all of us, and I will quote one more source: “Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing.” 1 Thessalonians 5:11 (NIV)