If you asked me to distill twenty-five years of teaching into a single question, the kind of question you could carry in your pocket and pull out whenever you’re trying to figure out how to reach someone, it would be this one. Where are you, and how can I lead you to where you need to be by acknowledging where you are and building on that? That’s it. That’s the whole philosophy. Everything else I do in a classroom, every technique, every exercise, every decision about how to structure a course, comes from that question, and it took me a long time to figure out that it was even the right question to ask.
Because the way most education works, and I’ve seen this from the inside for a quarter century so I’m not guessing, is that you start with where the student should be. The curriculum says they should know this by week four, so you teach this by week four, and if they’re already past it you bore them and if they’re not ready for it you lose them and either way you’ve served the schedule instead of the student. And the schedule doesn’t learn anything. The schedule doesn’t grow. The schedule just sits there, perfectly organized, while real human beings with real gaps and real strengths and real lives sit in front of you wondering why none of this feels like it’s for them.
I had a student once, early in her program, who came to my class with exactly zero design background. Hadn’t touched Photoshop, hadn’t studied typography, couldn’t tell you the difference between a serif and a sans-serif, and every assignment was a fight. She struggled with things other students sailed through, and her grades reflected it, and by any standard the system uses she was a below-average student. But she showed up every single class. She asked questions. She stayed after to practice. She took the feedback and actually used it, not just glanced at the number and moved on. And by the end of that semester she’d gone from knowing nothing to producing work that showed real thought and real understanding, and the grade on her transcript was a C, and that C was worth more than every A I gave that semester, because it represented actual transformation.
And then there was the student who’d been designing since high school, walked in already knowing the software, already familiar with the principles, pulled an A without breaking a sweat, and walked out knowing roughly the same amount they knew walking in. The system called that success. I called it a missed opportunity. That student needed to be challenged in ways the standard curriculum wasn’t set up to provide, and because I was trying to teach to the room instead of to the individual, I let them coast, and they lost a semester they could have spent growing.
You know, the hotel in Caracas taught me the same thing. I checked in and the staff pretended not to speak a word of English. Just blank stares and shrugs and pointing at things. And then I started stumbling through some awful, broken Spanish, really bad, embarrassingly bad, and the moment I tried, their English appeared. Big smiles. Warm conversation. Perfect comprehension. They’d had it the whole time. They just wanted to know I was willing to meet them on their terms before they’d meet me on mine. And I think about that every time I walk into a classroom, because students do the same thing. They hold back until they know you’re willing to come to where they are, and if you insist on staying where the curriculum says you should be, they’ll stand there with blank stares and shrugs and you’ll both miss everything that could have happened.
So that’s what I do now. I start by finding out where each student actually is, not where the schedule says they should be, not where their transcript suggests they are, but where they actually are in terms of what they understand, what they can do, what confuses them, and what excites them. And then I build from there. Sometimes that means slowing down for someone who needs more time with the fundamentals. Sometimes it means pushing someone further than the assignment requires because they’re ready for it and the standard expectations would just bore them into checking out. And it’s more work than following a syllabus, a lot more work, but it’s the only approach I’ve ever found that actually serves the person sitting in front of me instead of the system that put them there.
If you’re teaching, or parenting, or managing, or trying to reach anyone about anything, start with that question. Where are you? Not where should you be. Not where do I wish you were. Where are you, right now, with what you know and what you don’t. And then build from there. It’s slower than handing down instructions from a distance. But it’s the only way I’ve found that actually works.
