A Lesson from Someone Who Has a "Not-So-Perfect" Body

"I had the blues because I had no shoes,

Until upon the street, I met a man who had no feet."



This is a sentence from the article I gave out to Class 313 this morning.  After they listened to Unit 6 "Body Imperfect" and we had a discussion about the lesson, I told them that in fact we could learn a lot from people with disabilities.  Then I distributed the article, which was from Chapter 15 in Dale Carnegie's book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.   The chapter is entitled "Would you take a milion dollars for what you have?"

I had the students read the article silently for about 4 minutes and asked them to tell me what happened in the story.  They did a very good job by summarizing the story in only 5 sentences. 

The story goes this way.  At the beginning of the story, a man who went bankrupt was going to another city to borrow money and try to find a job there.  On his way to the city, he felt like "a beaten man"  until he came across a man without legs, who greeted him with a big smile.  At that moment he suddenly realized how rich he was.  He regained his faith, and with the faith he got the loan and a job.   

Those two lines appeared at the end of the article.  The man pasted the words on his bathroom mirror so that he could read them every morning when he was shaving. 

I asked the students to read the two lines aloud, hoping they would cherish what they had and always face their life positively. 

Finally I asked them if they would take a million dollars for what they had, for example, their two legs.  They answered in unison, "No." 

I love teaching English this way.  The language just serves as a tool which links the students to some great minds and beautiful hearts.