" Maybe you should have studied harder last night !" This is what I heard from my secondary school teacher every time I got an answer wrong in class. " I'm sorry Miss" I replied with sadness knowing I had spent hours doing my homework and studying! " Some students just don't know how to learn! " she would also say if the rest of my peers didn't have the answer that my teacher desired. Comments like these made me fall out of learning..... But! The day I met my Irish teacher "John" was the day things started to change for me. John grew up in old Ireland, a harsh environment for the young and the poor. He had seen many things that now are in our history books. And John loved to teach the Irish [Gaelic] language. In every class John would take a story from his past and make it educational. He would teach us our culture as well as the language. Most importantly he encouraged us in every class to learn one thing, it didn't matter what! "language is the key the world and if you have a key well then open a door! " he would say. There was never a bad answer in his class, only progress in our mistakes and that the more of them we made the more we had already learned. This is where I fell back into learning and ever since I have learned so much! I miss going to his classes but even now I find myself seeing language learning the way he did! everyday is progress as long as you are trying. Every time I make a mistake I smile knowing that I'm one less mistake away from getting it right. He also taught me that a student can excel if the teacher shows them how instead of telling them they should!