#1354 - consistency
"Consistency is the virtue of fools."
I was a teenager when I heard this sentence for the first time. During my last years of high school, I had some amazing teachers.
One of them, the weirdest of all, was the Italian teacher.
It was a school for accountants, and we were a special class focusing on computer science. As you can imagine, Italian literature wasn't the main interest for any of us. But it wasn't impossible not to love him.
He truly loved his job, and it is now clear to me - at the time, I couldn't understand fully - that his main goal was for us to learn to think with our heads. His mission was to help us observe reality with an open mind and then use language to shape and share our thoughts.
His classes were as much fun, at least to me, as unpredictable.
We never knew what was going to happen.
While we were able to figure out the patterns in all other teachers so we could minimize our efforts - remember, we were wannabe computer scientists in an accountancy school - with him, we were unable to predict his moves.
Once, one of us, with a bit more courage, told him that what we were doing that day was inconsistent with what we had done in previous classes.
I can still see the picture in my head of him leaning on the door to the balcony - his favourite place so he could smoke in class. He looked at us smiling and said, "consistency is the virtue of fools."
WE