About 10 years ago, I was waiting in the college library to meet a student who was, as usual, over 30 minutes late. There was a pile of free books that had gone out of use and were going to be recycled, if not taken away, and I took the top book out of pure boredom and started to read. The book was How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, and it changed my teaching forever. 

The book was originally published in 1937, which possibly explained why it was on a pile of scruffy and unused texts. Carnegie wrote it to help salespeople and businessmen to deal with people better, but he soon found that the principles of the book could apply to any walk of life - and so did the rest of the world. The book has sold over 30 million copies to date, and made the New York Times list of the most influential books in history.

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That day, the student I was waiting for was a habitual non-attender, who had been referred to me for one-to-one tuition as a last resort before he was kicked out. I managed only the first chapter of the book before he showed up, and, lucky for him, it was entitled “If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive”.

The book that inspires my college teaching

I was about to boot the beehive to kingdom come, having been kept waiting again and again for this student, who seemed to have no interest whatsoever in attending college but had at least five professionals spending hours a week trying to convince him to stay.

The language in the book can be highly stylised. Having been written in the Thirties, there are a lot of ejaculations - “What!”, “Indeed!”, “Heavens to murgatroyd!” and so on. He makes reference to old knickerbockers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Dale’s namesake Andrew Carnegie. And yet the principles of the book are timeless and universal, which led to me being able to put them into action with a 17-year-old from a deprived urban area in 2010.

Jack (not his real name) rocked up and launched into his excuses for why he was late and why he hadn’t been in all week. Chapter one’s principle is “Don’t criticise, condemn or complain”. I desperately wanted to do all three and launch into a tirade about responsibility and respect. But instead, when he finished telling me about the roadworks, the buses, the impromptu parade with elephants and plumed horses that blocked a major thoroughfare, and the alarm clock that was too quiet and really needed to be returned to the retailer, I just nodded. When he was out of steam, I said: “Well at least you’re here now, and it’s really nice to see you”.

For the 30-minute session I was with him, he regarded me with abject confusion because I hadn’t torn strips off him. The next day he was only five minutes late, and for every issue he brought, every behaviour that drove me insane, there was a chapter of the book. Eventually he came in 100 per cent, got a merit in his level 2 and progressed to level 3. Then he went to university.

I now reread the book at the start of every term, and it’s never steered me wrong. Lucky the top book on the stack wasn’t American Psycho or I could have had a very different career.

Kirsty Walker teaches at a college in the North West of England