Today I was driving home from taking my sons to swim lessons. I was thinking about how difficult it must be for the instructor to teach a 2yr old and a 1yr old the basics of swimming.
What looked like complete chaos to me, was a calculated exercise for the swimming instructor. In fact, as I watched, I half wondered what exactly we are getting for the amount of money we are paying.
The class is 30 minutes long and that is it. The boys show up, they splash around while the instructor repeats catchy phrases and they leave. They do this twice a week.
What I realized is that the lessons the boys learned in that seemingly chaotic 30 minutes last much longer than the time they are in the water. My 2 yr old Rex was repeating: zip, tickle the arms, blast off, the whole way home.
He was putting in to practice what he had learned, and what looked like a frolic in the pool that I was paying good money for, suddenly made sense.
The moral of the story is this. A good teacher can be teaching us a lesson without us even really knowing it. Think about that the next time you are bored to death or can’t see the point in listening to someone you are suppose to be learning from.
