Who is more important? A brain surgeon or an auto mechanic?

Every year I would ask that question to my 11th grade English classes and I always got the same answer: The brain surgeon.

And I would always respond: Tell that to the brain surgeon the day his car won’t start on the way to the operating room.

Why would I ask my 11th graders such a question? Because most of my English class kids were in the vocational school attached to our Vermont high school and when I gave them an assignment they didn’t want to do I would get whining: “We can’t do that. We’re the dumb kids. We aren’t in the college courses.”

I had been similarly demoralized myself as a 10th grader in Hamden High School in Hamden, Conn., 10 miles from Yale in 1961.

I had flunked the first year of Latin and when I refused to pick up a substitute foreign language, I was dropped from the college prep program and placed in the general program.

My guidance counselor even told me to my face, “You are not college material,” as if somehow he saw I was made of an inferior cloth.

I can still feel my cheeks blush with shame.

Suddenly without a foreign language to offer college admissions’ officers, I was segregated into the high school general preparation “business” courses and separated from all the kids who had been my friends in the “college” courses in the process.

I did indeed feel “dumb.”

When I became a high school English teacher 25 years later in Vermont, I promised myself I would never allow my kids think they were inferior to other students.

I pledged out loud to them on the first day of class that I would teach my regular English classes the same way I taught my college prep classes, with one difference: Regular English did not have 20 pages of extra credit reading every night.

However both regular and college prep would read the same books during daily class sessions (Death of a Salesman, A Raisin in the Sun, Macbeth, Oedipus Rex, etc.) and I would teach both courses the same way with the same level vocabulary and class discussions.

No watering down just because you aren’t college prep. Same books. Same topics.

And every year of my 25-year teaching career, I made a point of telling my classes that my own high school guidance counselor had told me I was “not college material.”

Then I named the four colleges and universities I had graduated from in 1968, 1972, 1980 and 1997.

It took years of persistence. Just count the decades.

At first in 1963 when I graduated from high school, I actually believed my guidance counselor. I didn’t even apply to college.

Instead, I worked a year delivering false teeth for a New Haven dental lab for $ 47.01 a week (after taxes).

It took me a year, but I found a college that would accept me without a foreign language requirement if I completed two years of a foreign language by the time I graduated from that college.

That was 1964, and I was off to the races.

Twenty four years later as a teacher, when I would share my “you’re not college material” story with my kids, I would offer this lesson: No adult knows what the future holds and no adult knows what material you are made of.

Human beings have a special invisible quality which has nothing to do with “material,” college or not. Some call it spirit. I call it gumption.

And nobody knows this invisible quality is there until it bubbles up in a person and they feel it growing inside.

Mechanic or brain surgeon, that gumption is inside everyone — created equally — just waiting to come out.

Maybe all it needs is a guidance counselor to trigger the process with a No.

Paul Keane lives in White River Junction. He is a graduate of Ithaca College, Kent State University, Yale University and Middlebury College.