Teachers can learn a lot from students if they’re paying attention and allowing them to express themselves.

In this girl’s case, she corrected (and surprised) her skeptical teacher in front of the entire class about one of her favorite subjects: trains.

Let’s see what happened.

You think I’m dumb? Then don’t teach things you don’t know…

Context: I’m a 16 year old Spanish who loves trains (trust me it’s important for the story).

So, this happened a while back at my high school.

We had this geography teacher who made the hardest exams ever.

And she is not exaggerating.

He would ask us to apply perfectly something we did in class, define a bunch of words the same way the book says and then three maps, one of Spain and the other two of two different continents.

We also had to say the country/region with it’s capital or else it wouldn’t count.

Most students in her class were struggling.

A little more context: In Spain we have three terms/evaluations per year where they tell us the grades.

Only the last one counts as official grades.

And in the second term, I was doing horrible, to the point of failing three subjects, arts, technology (I couldn’t do a project the teacher sent because I didn’t have a computer) and… Geography.

(To be fair, only three students out of twenty in my class passed geography on the second term)

So the teacher (he didn’t say it but it was clear by his looks) thought we were stupid bad students.

But then an opportunity to prove otherwise showed up.

Finally, he started to talk about trains, an industry which I know a lot about, thanks to my love for trains.

He started by explaining how in a steam train, the boiler is full of tubes that are full of water (wrong) and the heat of the fire turned the water into steam.

So I couldn’t resist.

I raised my hand and he asked me what I wanted.

I just said “that’s wrong, it’s the other way around, can I go and show…”

He said yes.

She schooled him in front of the whole class.

I immediately erased the drawing he made on the board and made my own, this time the correct one and I explained it.

(In a steam locomotive, the boiler is full of tubes that go from the place where the coal is burned to the front where the chimney is. Hot air goes through the tubes heating the water and turning it into steam that then goes to the cylinders and powers the wheels. Then the exhaust steam goes through a little valve that speeds the smoke out of the chimney.)

Her teacher was truly impressed.

The look on my teacher’s face was priceless and after class, he started asking me stuff about trains.

After that, my classmates thanked me for making that man shut up and started calling me “train driver” (Maquinista in Spanish) and they still call me that even after a year.

Also, the teacher ended up being nice to me and asking me things about trains like I were his friend. It was awesome.

This was a wholesome ending.

She kind of represented everyone in the class and showed what they’re capable of.

Let’s see what Reddit has to say about this.

A reader compliments her teacher.

Hehe.

A rare commodity these days.

I agree.

Another reader chimes in.

Exactly.

“If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Now he knows that just because they failed his difficult exams, it doesn’t mean they’re not smart.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.