Nigel 
August 28th,2009
I stupidly used to require teachers to be perfect. Then I became one.
We recently visited our sons and the grandchildren,all about 200 miles south of Leeds. On the drive back one of the articles Jenny read me from a magazine was about managing anger. We made a short list of people who might get angry if we showed them the article 
It also brought back memories of my younger days.
I was an odd child and young man (d’you feel another post coming on?),but my belief that other people should live up to my expectations was probably not that unusual. I’ve more or less grown out of it with a lot of help,especially from my family,but sometimes this daft bit of perfectionism raises its head again.
The thing is I kind of required the world to be set up the way I felt it should be. Normally I would fume in silence,but when depressed I could explode with angry words. Memory has edited most of these incidents out,but some remain as warnings.
On one occasion aged 17 I went to the far end of school to fetch something,can’t remember what. I guess it mattered at the time. The door was unexpectedly locked. The sensible thing would have been to seek out the teacher responsible,smile,ask if I might borrow the key and casually enquire if the door would normally now be locked. I must have been a bit stressed or a bit down because I actually stormed over to his teaching room and shouted at him. To his credit he remained calm in telling me my behaviour was unacceptable. To his discredit he did not take the opportunity either to teach me how to work better with people or to find out why I was prone to such outbursts –not that being diagnosed as depressive would have helped much then.
It did not occur to me to consider what his reasons might have been for locking the door,or why he might not have been able to notify everyone who might possibly be affected. I was an arrogant person. I was annoyed I’d been inconvenienced and that was all that mattered. Also it was okay for me to be flawed (like blowing up over nothing) but I expected everyone else to be perfect. They should be. That’s how God should have designed my universe. And this guy even more should never make a mistake because he was (shock,awe) a Teacher.
Many of us continue to think this way even as otherwise mature adults,especially when tired or stressed or down. From time to time we expect more of someone else than of ourselves,and we rarely question this silly attitude. The fact is that everyone is human,everyone has off days,everyone sometimes forgets something important to someone else,everyone is a bit selfish. On top of this there may be excellent reasons we haven’t thought of why someone chooses to act contrary to our expectations.
We need to lower our expectations of others. When they turn out to be human we need to give them a break,and not shorten our own lives by getting angry with them. It’s not easy for those of us prone to this,but it is possible. A useful start is to ask in a genuine way why they might have behaved the way they did. It might be something inside them such as that they plain forgot,or it might be that they have seen something of the situation we missed and have acted accordingly.
Copyright picture:
The cartoon is copyright (c) Miriam Slechta 2009. It is taken (and the caption adapted) from Nigel’s still unpublished book ‘Subversive Ramblings 1‘,and is actually one of our ‘Uses For A Maths Teacher’series.
