The "unexpected gifts" ...

Teaching is always a challenge but more so when one is not acquainted with some of the students who will be attending a particular course. To be able to "succeed" especially in non technical oriented courses, such as this one I feel that as a teacher one needs to get the "feeling" of what may or may not catch students' attention and what can be done to "trigger" their interest and creativity in and out of the classroom.

Uniqueness played its role again this time and because of it what might have easily turned out into rather dull classes ended up being uniquely interesting weekly "encounters", that we all hope will continue in the near future.

As we were analysing one of the films we watched in the classroom we learned what strong impact an "unexpected" gift" can have on the person who gets it and that was what actually happened on the last day, when I was invited by these students to have lunch out in a rather interesting restaurant and offered a few meaningful gifts, despite the fact that the greatest gift of all was simply being able to spend some extra time with them out of the classroom walls.

Words of appraisal were written by each of them on a notebook I was handed out and which I'll forever cherish. If a preface could be (or have been) added to it, it might simply state that teachers can only be as good as the students they have within the class and in the sharing of that precious time sometimes (not to say most of the time) teachers get to "learn" as much as the ones they have in front of them.