I was once in a class in which none of the students would ever graduate. Each student in our class seemed to be a troublemaker. None of our teachers had stayed for longer than a week until Mrs Cosby came.
One morning, the door to the classroom opened and a new teacher walked in. It was Mrs Cosby. She looked very kind. And we surely gave her a hard time and thought she wouldn't stay for more than a week. But no matter what we did, she never got stroppy with us. And slowly we got worried about how to drive her away.
Then came the last day of the first month. She went into the classroom with some pieces of paper in her hands. We feared that the worst would happen—a test. However, it wasn't a test, but something surprised us. Mrs Cosby gave each of us a piece of paper. On each piece of paper she had written what the student had been good at during the last month. We were surprised, No one had ever encouraged us before she came. We had been always told we were the silliest in the world. But she told us we were intelligent in some way.
From that day we started to believe in ourselves. From that day we stopped making her life hard and began to study really hard. Other teachers couldn't understand what happened to us. But we knew the reason—each month we got a piece of paper telling us what we were good at from Mrs Cosby.
And then came the day of our graduation. That day Mrs Cosby told us that she was proud of us. She said she knew we were good students and that we could succeed. What we needed was to believe in ourselves.
