How One Card Changed My Life, Even to This Day

It’s early December 1990 and I’m still in my office at 9pm on a Monday night, wading through my student papers.

I’m teaching in the business department at Saint Mary’s University. I still shake my head at the fact that I’m teaching. When I started 15 months ago, people asked me if I had any training in education. I don’t.

I’d burned out from the job I had before, working at transforming the way a broadcasting company operated. I’d been based in Winnipeg, and when I left that job I decided to come home for a bit to recuperate and reconnect with family. I’d always wanted to try out teaching so a took a job teaching at Mount Saint Vincent University last year and move to SMU this fall.

When I started teaching I didn’t really know how to approach it. I walked through the halls of local universities, glancing in classrooms, trying to see what other professors did.

What I realized is that many university professors are amazing hypnotists. They put their classes into trance. Anything I did beyond that would be amazing.

I knew what the students will be facing when they go into the workforce, and memorizing theory would be irrelevant if they didn’t know how to apply it. My MBA had been a case-based school, where we taught ourselves theory as we needed it, and we spent our classes discussing actual business cases, learning how to think, so I decided that was the best I could do for my students to prepare them for the future.

What I didn’t realize was how much work that would create for me. In addition to prepping a new case for each class, the students had to work in teams with an actual business. I treated each team as if they were a team of consultants working for me, and they passed in four drafts of a report over the term, each of which I critiqued, and that they built on with research.

I’m now pouring through the final draft. With three strategy classes of thirty students each, I’m going through 25 different typed reports.

When I mark, I use a green pen, and often there’s more green than black ink when they get the reports back. I feel that’s my job to show them what they did well and what they need to do in order to do better.

I’m also sure they hate me for being such a taskmaster. They don’t get why I’m doing this — to prepare them for the workforce.

It also means hours and hours for me.

I’m resentful of the other tenured professors who go in and entrance the students with the same notes they’ve had for years, often prepared by the textbook companies. They run multiple guess exams and have their markers mark them.

Markers can’t provide the feedback I’m giving them.

I pull back in my chair. I’m even resentful of the students right now. I’m so tired, and I’m sure they don’t appreciate it.

I stretch my arms back and shake my head awake.

That’s when I see it. My office door was mostly closed — just a little ajar.

There’s an envelope on the floor, slipped under the door.

I get up and get the envelope and open it to find a Christmas card. Opening it and reading it, I start to cry.

It read:

We acknowledge your dedication throughout the year and found your classes both beneficial and interesting. We hope that after marking our projects you will be able to have a relaxing and safe holiday season.

Wishing you a Merry Christmas.

A Couple of Concerned Students!

That card changed everything for me. I never again questioned the gift that I had been given to help those students, and it fueled my passion for the rest of my time teaching.

I still don’t know who those students were who sent me that card, but I have it still, and it still brings tears to my eyes.

Never doubt the power of an act of kindness to another. You can never know how much it’s needed and how deeply it can touch someone.