In the heart of corn country in the 1890s lived a boy of a small town where trains didn’t even stop. This boy had something that many at that time did not have in such a place. He had a grandad who was seven million dollar’s rich. When you are a man of such stature, you can afford to be somewhat autocratic and so he often would dictate his grandson’s future. He told the little boy that he was to attend Harvard Law School and he was to become a lawyer. The little boy, on the other hand, would say things like, “I am going to become an acrobat.” His mother would smile but grandpa would not smile and so he just kept telling the boy that he would become a lawyer and so the boy finally relented to grandpa’s wishes.
He completed his undergraduate work at Yale in 1913. Grandpa took that occasion to remind the boy of an earlier promise. That the day he received his law degree, he would also receive one-sixth of his grandfather’s fortune, which would be more than a million dollars.
The young man entered law school and he started the classes. At some point in his first semester, some of the students put on a show. A very informal thing and mostly social. Faculty were invited. Our young man was invited to participate. He happily accepted because he played the piano little after all.
It just so happened that Ezra Ripley Thayer was attending the performance that night. He was the Dean of the Harvard Law School at the time. He heard the young boy play and sing at the performance. When the performance was over, Ezra took the young man aside and made this recommendation. He told the young man that he is not a fit for the study of law but we have a marvelous school of music and you should switch without telling anyone. Our loss of a poor student will be their gain of a talented student.
The young man followed Dean Thayer’s advice. He never wanted to become a lawyer in the first place for he was doing it to please his grandfather. He knew that he would be happier as a musician.
When grandpa discovered that his grandson quit law school, he was furious. Play the piano if you want but don’t try to make a career out of it. After grandfather died, he left his grandson a million dollars anyway but that isn’t the story is it. Once upon a time, a future lawyer gave up law school to pick up a pen and write songs. He wrote more songs then we can count. Cole Albert Porter was an American composer and songwriter who wrote many of our great American classics.
Not knowing what each of our students will become should encourage us to continue to expose them to all the possibilities. Compliance should not be our goal but engagement. All experts start from the same place of knowing nothing about the topic and then slowly moving from a cursory knowledge of the topic to finding the content fascinating. This happens because we begin to help them understand the smaller nuances of the topic. It is when they discover the nuances that they become invested in finding out more.
Continue to invest in your student’s curious nature to learn the nuances of the information that they are learning. They and we don’t know what will click for them and set them on a path that they couldn’t have predicted would be their future. Our first reaction to most new knowledge is to balk at putting in the effort to get to the nuance level. Why do the work when, from what I know now, it just doesn’t seem worth it. It is only when they get to the level of smaller micro understandings when someone can really determine if it is for them.
Have a super weekend,
Rob