Happy Medium

In my teaching career, I had two colleagues who embodied opposite viewpoints on education: one would reproach me for using words that pupils did not know, saying "How can they learn if they don’t understand you?"; the other would dissent, arguing, "How can they learn anything if they’re never exposed to things they don’t already understand?"

One of the best compliments I ever received was when one of a group of former pupils wrote to me from university, saying that their economics lecturer was unintelligible, but after every lecture they would get together and ask themselves, “How would Mr Hall have explained this?”

I was reassured, reckoning I must have come close to an Aristotelian happy medium.