Joie’s Newsletter #12
The Best Teacher I Ever Had Made Me Cry
I was a doctoral student at Harvard, working on my dissertation, and like most graduate students, I became obsessed with my adviser's edits. Every time she returned a chapter, I pored over every comment. I wasn't just revising sentences. I was trying to reverse engineer her thinking. I assumed there was a right answer hidden somewhere in all those edits, and if I worked hard enough, I could figure out exactly what she wanted me to say. When I finally sent her a draft that incorporated every suggestion, I felt relieved. Surely this time I had gotten it right.
A few days later, I opened the document again and couldn't believe what I was seeing. She hadn't just edited my writing. She had edited her own edits. Entire sentences she had told me to write were now crossed out and replaced.
I remember sitting in her office completely overwhelmed. Through tears, I said, "I don't understand what you want from me. I changed it exactly the way you told me to." She let me finish, waited for me to stop crying, and then said five words I have never forgotten:
"It can always be better."
I've thought about those words many times, and I still have mixed feelings about them. There is something unhealthy about believing everything can always be better. There will always be another sentence to rewrite, another email to polish, another presentation to improve. If you aren't careful, the pursuit of “better” can become the enemy of finished.
It took me years of working with students to understand that moment differently.
At the time, I thought she already knew the answer and that my job was to get in her head and figure out what it was. In reality, neither of us knew exactly where the research was going. She kept revising her own edits because her thinking was evolving too. She wasn't moving the finish line. She was discovering it alongside me.
That lesson has shaped the way we work with students today. Our job isn't to tell them exactly what to do or hand them some secret formula for getting into college. It is to push them to think harder, dig deeper, try again, and discover that they are capable of more than they initially believed. Sometimes that means challenging an idea they love or asking for one more draft when they thought they were finished.
I have honestly forgotten most of what I wrote in my dissertation. But I have never forgotten those five words. It can always be better. Not because anything we do will ever be perfect, but because the best teachers help us discover how much further we can go.
Education expert, founder, author of “B+ Grades, A+ College Application.”
