Early Morning Coffee Conversations.

”Can I ask you something?”

What’s one think you wish schools actually taught? Isn’t that an interesting question? And as a teacher, I probably ought to say something wonderfully educational, like: Financial literacy. First aid. Cooking. How taxes work…

All are excellent answers and all are incredibly useful… But, the older I get, the more I think there’s one lesson we all could have used.

I wish someone had taught us how to be kinder to ourselves.

School teaches us how to solve questions, how to write essays, how to remember dates, formulas and vocabulary. But nobody ever hands you a lesson called ”What to do when you make a mistake”. Instead, we grow up believing that mistakes are embarrassing. That getting something wrong means we are not good enough. That everyone else has life figured out while we’re quietly making it up as we go.

The funny this is that as a teacher myself, I have seen children apologise for getting the wrong answers. As though learning wasn’t the whole point of being there! Sometimes, they looked at me with that worried expression that says ”I am sorry… I don’t know’‘, and every time, I want to tell them the same thing. ”That’s perfectly okay”. Because not knowing is where learning begins.

Somewhere along the way, though, we forget to say those words to ourselves. We spill coffee, forget birthdays, burn dinner, send the email with that typo, miss an opportunity, change our minds, have difficult days… And instead of saying ”You’ll do better tomorrow”, we become our own harshest critic.

I have often wondered what would happen if we spoke to ourselves the way we speak to our favourite people. Imagine telling a friend ”You make one mistake today, so clearly you are a complete failure”…. You’d never say it. Not in a million years. Somehow, we say versions of it to ourselves all the time. Perhaps that’s the lesson I wish we’d all learned a little earlier.

That our worth was never tied to perfect marks. Or flawless days. Or always having the right answer. Maybe education isn’t just about filling our minds. Maybe it’s also about teaching our hearts how to keep going when things don’t go as planned.

After all, some of the most important lessons in life don’t appear in textbooks. They appear in ordinary days, in trying again, in asking for help, in forgiving ourselves… In remembering that being human was never supposed to mean being perfect.

And I think, that might have been my favourite lesson of all.