I’m a teacher.
I teach English to German students and business people but there is more to it than that. I don’t just talk about punctuation and grammar rules, in my classes we talk about all kinds of things. We talk about weekends and holidays, about football games and music. The key to language instruction is speaking; you have to get people talking to each other, because that is when they pay attention.

But this isn’t an article about teaching; it’s actually an article about keys.  I just wanted to see if you were paying attention.
We have lots of keys, car keys, house keys, key cards for work and when we are at work we are told about the keys to our success. As a self-employed teacher it is hard to know the keys to my success, there are no managers above me who will tell me. I have to figure it out on my own.
Recently, I had a class of students who wanted to talk about the Greek Crisis. Well, some of them wanted to talk about it, others were just confused. I thought this would be a great test of my ability to teach. If I could tech them about this, I could really pat myself on the back.
After almost 2 hours of talking about how all the Greek crisis issues are connected; the way Greece got in trouble (Goldman Sachs), the yield on Irish government bonds (8.5%) and why the German Chancellor is so keen on keeping the Euro zone together (Domino effect), the truth became clear…
The people who were confused before were still confused, probably even more confused. No keys to success here.
Because, once again, it’s not really about teaching, it’s about keys. The keys that helped me understand the crisis did not work for these students. You can’t use your car keys to open your office door, (assuming you are one of the few who still has an office with a door).
When you get the key card to your hotel room, it looks a lot like a credit card, but it’s not. Trying using your room key to pay for a new TV, I don’t think it works that way.
The point is, not all keys fit all locks. When the key does not fit, try a different key, don’t keep banging away at the same lock with the same key like I did in class. When the key doesn’t fit, and you keep trying to make it fit, things can get confusing.

I think next time I want my back patted, I’ll just ask my wife Nina to do it.

I’m Steve Sackinger, and I hope you have a good week.

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Andy Rooney passed away yesterday. I was sorry to hear that. I wanted to write this blog entry in his style. He would do a much better job of course, but unfortunately he is not available at the moment.  :-(