Passing comments can have a long impact

My son Ed has been a high school English teacher for 28 years — five years more than I have been a college instructor. Early in his career, when I was still working as a magazine editor, he invited me to guest teach in his class.

It was eye-opening. For the first time, I experienced how challenging it was to engage a group of teenage students. But more importantly, I got to see how good a teacher he is and how devoted his students seemed to be to him.

His students were also curious about his life. At the end of the class he let students ask any questions of me or Nancy, my wife and Ed’s mother, who was also a guest. One young woman asked Nancy: “So he was your little boy?” The spark of recognition that he too had been a child once like them, somebody’s little boy, made her and others in the class smile.

I bring the experience up because it was that day Ed answered my question of how he knew he was reaching his students. He told us he didn’t know for certain but figured that if even one thing he taught throughout the term stuck with a student long after the class was over, he should count it a success. Many of his students stay in touch with him years after studying with him. He can count many successes.

Now that I have been teaching for 23 years, I have embraced the idea that while I work hard to teach specific stuff to specific groups of students, I never know what will stick. It turns out that sometimes small successes happen with those who are not even in a class with me.

Last June, I received an email from a student. “Early during Fall semester,” he wrote, he was walking to someone else’s class when he happened to notice a quote I keep taped to my office door. It’s from poet Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

“The more I thought about it, the more courage I got to do things I wanted to do and be rather than what my environment was telling me to do,” he wrote. "In a lot of ways, it defined how I used my time at [school] and what I want to do from here on in my life.”

He ended by thanking me for having inspired him. My first impulse was to respond by telling him that I hadn’t inspired him, it was Oliver’s words that had. But I had chosen that quote and a few others to place on my door, hoping students or others on campus might find them useful. It was my son Ed who inspired me to do whatever I could, inside the classroom or out, to try to reach students in any way.

Instead of brushing off the compliment from the student, I responded by thanking him. And now I will remind Ed of how much his passing comment early on in his teaching career and before mine began has influenced the way I try to teach. When someone gives us something that has a lasting impact long beyond its origin, it only seems the right thing to do.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

 

Is a partner wrong not to agree it's time to behave differently?

     For some time, I’ve been sitting on a question raised by a handful of readers who happened to share a practice in their marriage that caused them to wonder about its ethical intricacies. The practice went something like this: As one member of the marriage spent money on themselves, the other felt it only fair that they spend an equal amount, even if they didn’t really desire anything at that moment. Judging from the questions, the practice evolved from some sense that the partners didn’t entirely trust one another to be responsible with money so they better spend equivalent amounts before the resources ran out.

I suspect there was more behind the motivation to keep score on who spent what, but the underlying premise was it was only fair that if partner A got whatever, then partner B deserved to get an equal whatever. The question I received typically arrived after one of the partners wanted to stop this practice while the other one didn’t. Was their partner’s choice not to stop unethical, was the question.

Let me remind readers that I am not a marriage counselor, psychologist or any sort of psychotherapist. My approach to therapy, I sometimes joke, would be to hear what behavior is bothering a client and then tell them to knock it off. If they arrived at the next session without having knocked off that behavior I would double my rates, and then proceed to double them each time the client showed up not having resolved the problem. While I might find such an approach inspired, I am confident it does not make for good psychotherapy. I don’t know, because I am not a therapist.

But the question of whether it’s unethical for a partner not to agree to stop a joint behavior because the other partner wants to change is one I can address. The short answer is that no, it is not inherently unethical behavior if someone doesn’t agree to stop doing something we don’t want them to do.

There are behaviors we might not like in others, behaviors with which we disagree, behaviors which we wish weren’t so, but that doesn’t make them unethical. In her essay, “On Morality,” published in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," Joan Didion wrote: “Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.”

I agree. Simply because we disagree with a behavior does not make it unethical.

Taking the time to find out why there is enough of a lack of trust in one another to feel the need for such a tit-for-tat practice seems the right thing to do rather than to perseverate about who is right and who wrong. If the services of a strong marriage counselor or therapist is needed to kick-start and mediate such a conversation, then that seems better money spent than trying to buy stuff simply to keep up with a partner’s outlays.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Check yourself when riding with others

“Check yourself,” an older woman who was seated on the subway car in Boston yelled quite loudly and clearly agitatedly at the young man who was standing next to her. “Your backpack keeps hitting me.”

The young man shifted a bit presumably so his backpack would be behind him and not knocking against the seated woman next to him. No luck.

“Just take the backpack off,” she yelled, repeating: “Check yourself.”

Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority can be an amazingly efficient way to get to work. I ride it every weekday morning. Most typically, it is anything but efficient. As more riders returned this year, the MBTA claimed it was short-staffed so trains ran less frequently, which resulted in longer waits and many passengers seeming to be a bit more on edge. Sometimes the boards announcing wait times work. Sometimes they don’t. And sometimes an announcer asks people to remove their backpacks before boarding, but most often that announcement doesn’t run. The MBTA is consistently inconsistent.

More passengers carrying backpacks do not remove their backpacks when they are riding the train. Rarely does anyone call them on it, even when their backpacks occasionally knock into the person behind or next to them.

But the seated older woman on this morning called out the young man quite sternly and loudly.

Should the young man have been thoughtful enough to remove his backpack upon entering the train? At the very least should he have been aware enough of his surroundings to realize his backpack was knocking into the woman next to him? Should he have had the wherewithal to “check himself” without having to be yelled at to do so?

And was the seated older woman right to yell at the young man before asking him if he could remove his backpack? She did, after all, go right to a DEFCON-level engagement before simply asking him to remove his backpack because it was hitting her.

No one I know likes to be smacked around with a backpack. It seems a normal response to be agitated when it happens. But sometimes simply pointing out the issue to the backpack wearer and asking if they might remove it can resolve the issue. And yes, sometimes people being asked to correct their behavior – even if asked politely – respond badly.

In searching for the right thing to do in such circumstances, the young man should have been more aware of how his appendage might cause discomfort to other passengers and the older seated woman should have considered whether yelling was the most effective way to resolve the issue.

The young man did not remove his backpack, but he did get off at the next stop. I placed my backpack that had been on one of my shoulders between my feet as I stood for the rest of the ride. I should have thought to check myself and place it there when I got on the train in the first place.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of "The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.