“Of course I have,” I replied.

“And what do you do at such times?”

“I teach, of course.”

They were then always smiling at me, particularly when I explained how happy the people are, whose job is also their hobby. “Do what you like and you don’t have to work anymore,” as the saying goes.

So I didn’t have reason to complain about this, but I didn’t really complain about other things either, I made a habit of having a positive attitude literally towards everything quite early. Is it perhaps the key to survive tough times? For example when losing a parent, being after divorce, or when a mom raises two small children alone while she has two jobs and meanwhile she can barely pay the higher monthly payments of their loans. I constantly had a lack of time, I was running from one place to get on time to the other, and at the end of the day I was rushing home to be able to make dinner at a relatively normal time. Sometimes I was even joking about the days consisting of only 24 hours unfortunately. But my students didn’t perceive anything of my efforts, at least that’s what I had presumed, until that particular day.

The lesson started as usual, with the practice of type 2 conditional sentences, which was one of my favourite structures. What would you do if you won the lottery? I asked the usual question after the grammar explanation and solving some exercises, and was waiting curiously for my twelve-year-old student’s answer. What would he buy? Will his answer be the usual house and the car, or a holiday home? Or does he have other plans? Perhaps he has no clue what to do with that much money and he will be uncertain. But he wasn’t unsure at all, he knew exactly what he would spend that fortune on. He looked at me, with a serious expression on his face, and firmly stated:

“I’d buy you time.”

And I was just sitting opposite him, unable to say a word, and thought that I still need to learn a lot from children.

(The Hungarian translation is available on www.onbizalomfejlesztes.hu.)