Student or Teacher?

As many people already know, I work for K12 as a teacher.  What many people do NOT know is that I also work on the TAMS team.  The TAMS team is the support line.  We do chat support and a little phone support.  Students can come onto Live Chat and get help with schoolwork or technical issues.  (Phone support is more for technical issues only...)

Anyway, a few months ago, I had a student come on needing some help getting past some writer's block on a story she was writing for a class.  I helped her past the block by brainstorming with her.  A few days later, she came back for help again.  Her story was amazing, and as we worked on brainstorming for it, she decided to go beyond the assignment and turn it into a novel.

I've worked with this student a lot over the past months, as she comes on to brainstorm or work through problems she is having with the story.  She finished the first one (a full-blown novel) and started a sequel to it.  The story is amazing, and it won't surprise me if she really does get it published when she's a little older.

But what I really learned from this student was not academic.  I started out as the teacher, but as I got to know her and understand her personal life, I began to learn a lot of amazing lessons from her.  Specific lessons are hard to pin point because it's been so prolonged.  But the biggest lesson was that I went into it assuming I'd help her and it would be all one way.

Instead, I have learned more from her than she ever did from me.  My point?  We need to go into every situation hoping to learn and improve ourselves- not just hoping to teach and improve someone else. After I learned so much from this amazing student, it made me wonder how many other people I could have learned from if I had let myself.

Just a thought.