not teaching too hard
Transcript of this video:
I’m in Oxford with friends this weekend and I’ve broken off to come on a nostalgic trip down memory lane – well actually New College Lane.
I guess it’s true for all of us that the city where we spend our young adulthood’s adventures and agonies has a nostalgic pull and this place certainly does.
Behind me is a house once owned by the astronomer Halley and it was here in my first year that I had my economics tutorials with a guy called Roger Opie.
Now I really struggled with economics – at the time I thought because I wasn’t that bright
With the passing years I’ve come increasingly to believe that because much of it was nonsense… but I turned up for Roger’s tutorials with my not-particularly-impressive essay and what was interesting was I realised in the session that I was fairly confused about the subject and he tried to put me right on it… but the delightful thing about Roger was he never left me feeling bad in fact I often came out of his tutorials knowing very little more about economics but feeling much better about myself
And I think that’s a hugely important quality in human relationships: not to get so attached to teaching people things that we actually break the relationship.
And you know for me as a young guy the sense of holding that allowed me to cope so that I could eventually scrape some kind of first year pass.
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
