The Wise Teacher and His Students

Once upon a time, there was a very strict but also smart teacher. His students valued his wisdom and respected him a lot. However, there was this one pupil who just couldn’t stand still. He couldn’t sit down and be quiet. He was using his phone in the middle of the lesson, he chewed a gum on purpose. He was eating and talking endlessly. Unfortunately, other students had started to become like him. They started to misbehave. The teacher was helpless. He was busy with getting them to be silent instead of focus on teaching. Eventually, teaching was almost impossible for the poor teacher, so he had an idea. He put on funny clothes, grabbed his lunch and entered the class. He set behind his table and started eating and playing with his phone. The students liked the way their teacher acted. It felt like someone else entered the class, someone completely different and new. Although, as the days passed, the pupils understood the message that their teacher had tried to convey. All of a sudden, they started sitting silently, and found themselves trying to convince their old teacher to come back. They realized that they misbehaved.

However, even if they did try to behave themselves,  a bad student doesn’t become a good one really. He can behave like a good student, talk nicely to his teachers, do all his homework on time, raise his hand when wanting to speak, and keep quiet during the lessons- and still remain bad on the inside! When the teacher came back to himself, those ‘good’ students continue their show – they were excellent in everything that they had done. One day, they skimmed and planned to cheat in the upcoming test. They had been preparing for the event for weeks and when the time came- they were so good at the material, due to all the preparations…..that they didn’t have to use their pre-prepared notes. Surprisingly, they really became good students. Fake it till you make it! This was what they’d practiced.

Undoubtedly, the wise teacher had known before that his students wanted to cheat in the exam, so he made his students’ plan work as it should in order to teach them a profound lesson for the future. On the day of the exam, the teacher gave his students their exam and the whole lesson to do it, he gave them the exam with a paper of the answers at the end of it. They didn’t tell him about the answers’ sheet and kept it as a secret, so they did the exam in just 10 minutes and handed it to their teacher. On the following day, the wise teacher came to the class with the graded exams and gave them to his students. Surprisingly, all of the students were failed in the exam and shocked! They told their teacher about the sheet of answers and there was no doubt that all of them would succeed. Then, the teacher told them that he did that for a certain purpose and actually it worked. He said that he put wrong answers for the questions in order to check if they studied or not. At last, he told them an important moral for their future which is not to be affected by fake things and always be ready to face the difficulties of life honestly.

After the teacher had explained to the students why he did what he did with the answers sheet, and gave them very important advice to help them improve their behavior and become better students and much better human beings, the teacher announced that he will give the student a second chance to pass the exam and improve their grades by  re-doing the exam. Therefore, the teacher set a date for the exam and told the students to study hard and give it their best this time to succeed without cheating but by their personal effort. After that,The students were ashamed of themselves and felt sorry for the way they behaved in and decided to try and become better by preparing and studying hard for the exam as a start. The day of the exam had arrived and the students have studied hard and came as prepared as they can be, after the exam had finished and the teacher had graded it, he was surprised by the astonishing improvement in the student’s grades and was pleased and proud that his actions and his words had such a positive effect on his students.

The biggest surprise for the teacher, who was surprised by his students to apologies to him for their misbehave and recklessness in the beginning.

The students realized the importance of studying and preparing for the difficult confrontations in the future, and realizing the value of their teacher and that he was not only a teacher for them,but also an educator.

Thus the wise teacher learns his students an important lesson and not to trust fake things and to rely on themselves and their personal effort that the teacher did it to their benefits. Then the students became different, intelligent, honest people who came every day with new enthusiasm to his class and studied hard the materials diligently and reviewed them always so the wise teacher was pleased that his actions reached his message.