At the end of the school year, the question I most like to ask my students is this: So, what did you learn this year? It often takes them aback, and I would see their minds racing to provide what they think might be the right answer. As an English teacher, the most popular answer was the most concrete: “vocabulary.” That answer would strike me as strange because I actually don’t “teach” a lot of vocabulary as a stand-alone subject, but OK, we can start there. But seriously, I’d counter the student: Go deeper. Is that all you learned? What else are you going to take away from all this time we spent together? What from this class will go into your suitcase as you travel to new horizons? What do you say? Hmmm?

I imagine the beads of sweat that would break out between the shoulder blades as students racked their brains. I know our minds don’t often work well under pressure, so instead of an oral examination, I’ll assign it as a writing task. That way students have time to think quietly, to gather their thoughts and their words in private. Writing almost always yields a richer reflection. And the results made for fascinating reading, even when it hurt. What did you learn? It was the closest I could get to a real report card — for me.

One of my worst days as a teacher was when a student told me his answer to that question. I had asked to speak with him privately because he appeared so agitated in class, and I wanted to know what was going on.

We were standing in the hall, just outside the door when he said it: “I have learned nothing in your class.” Is there any greater slap to a teacher’s ego? I stood there, dumbfounded in my shock that such a thing could be not only true but also spoken to my face.

I started to ramble off the list of books we’d read, the writing assignments, projects, even the class discussions, but to every offering I was met by that same shaking head. Nothing.

Well, I can’t speak for that student, but I can tell you that I learned a lot from that moment. I learned that even though I had been teaching my head off, it didn’t mean that students were learning. That was a bitter piece of feedback, but I needed to hear it.

At the same time, I learned that I can’t please — or teach — everyone. While I may think of myself as a modern day Marva Collins, the truth is I’m not that good (not even close). Still, I’m not that bad, either, and while this student may not have been able to partake of the full and ample banquet of my pedagogy, many other students were getting a great meal, and thanking me for it (although always beware the student who thanks you. There may be more here than meets the eye! I have learned that when it comes to students, there is always more to the story than meets the eye).

And I remembered what I knew from my own past: that what is true today is not always true tomorrow. Who knows what that student would say today, now five years after this conversation?

Because here’s what really baffled me about this encounter: How is it even possible to sit in a classroom and just “not learn”?

We’ve all been there, right? Sitting in that torture chair, watching that clock (analog!) as it crawled to the last minute. Where is the learning in that context?

But the truth is we are learning even there, even if we are learning the limits of our own attention spans. Whether we realize it, learning is always happening. And this is a key point that many people don’t see (because it’s rarely taught).

Many people believe learning comes in a box that comes out only in certain places, like museums and libraries and most definitely schools, and in specific contexts, like when there is a teacher in front of the room. We misunderstand what learning truly is.

Here’s my definition: Learning is a process that begins even before you were born and can continue to our final hour — and maybe even beyond! Who knows?

Not everything we learn is helpful, however. We need to learn to question whether what we are learning is bringing about a positive result.

Sometimes we are expected to learn things that we just don’t care about (like my former student, perhaps). And sometimes what we learn is not even necessarily true or helpful. Still — that doesn’t mean we’re not learning. Maybe we are learning the “wrong” things, but it’s still learning. Can we begin to see how big learning really is?

And here’s the point: What we learn matters. After all the talk about content fades into background noise, when we put the political arguments on mute (not forever but periodically), we have a choice: We can learn to love, or we can learn to hate. We can learn to judge or we can learn to embrace. We can learn violence or we can learn peace.

This brings me full circle to the question I posed in this column when it first appeared in this paper: What is it you most want our children to learn? Let the answer to that question guide us forward as teachers and as learners.

Gay Collins of Preston is a retired teacher in the Waterford school system who has a master’s degree from Connecticut College. She can be reached at yagspill@gmail.com.