{"id":10862,"date":"2015-04-03T09:04:44","date_gmt":"2015-04-03T09:04:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.briancullen.net\/stories\/?p=575"},"modified":"2020-08-18T02:49:57","modified_gmt":"2020-08-18T02:49:57","slug":"a-decision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/2015\/04\/03\/a-decision\/","title":{"rendered":"A Decision"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>One night, I was playing guitar and singing in an Irish pub in Japan and a young woman walked in. I knew that I knew her from somewhere, and she clearly recognized me. At the break, she came up and asked me in excellent English that difficult question, &#8222;Do you remember me?&#8220;<\/div>\n<div>I had to admit that I remembered her face but couldn&#8217;t remember where we had met.<\/div>\n<p>She told me that I had been her English teacher\u00a08 years previously in high school, and then it all came back to me. Yes, I remembered her. I remembered her whole class because it was my least favourite class of all my time teaching in high school. I remembered that horrible feeling just walking towards the classroom before either of their two weekly lessons.<\/p>\n<div>\n<div>And I also remember making a promise to myself at that time that I would try harder in those classes than any other classes. So before every single class, I stood outside for a moment and reminded myself of that decision. \u00a0At the end of the year, I was so happy to say goodbye to them. I still didn&#8217;t like that group of students, but I had tried.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The young woman in the Irish pub remembered those lessons, too.<\/div>\n<div>&#8222;There were some bad students in that class, but you tried so hard in every lesson to teach us that you really made me interested in English. Because of that, I decided to go to the United States to study nursing. Your class really inspired me. It changed my life.&#8220;<\/div>\n<div>We never know when our little efforts and little words can change a person&#8217;s life and bring happiness in ways that we could never have imagined.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One night, I was playing guitar and singing in an Irish pub in Japan and a young woman walked in. I knew that I knew her from somewhere, and she clearly recognized me. At the break, she came up and asked me in excellent English that difficult question, &#8222;Do you remember me?&#8220; I had to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other","category-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10862"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11254,"href":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10862\/revisions\/11254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}