Even with over 20 years of hindsight and quite a lot of teaching experience, it still doesn't seem to me to be such a strange request. After all, they'd been in school for six years already, and I was brand new with my teaching degree. So in one of my first meetings with my pupils I said to them that I expected them to help me learn to be a teacher. Ultimately, in practice they actually did this: "call us 'children', not 'people'", "don't ask us our opinion, tell us what we're supposed to do", and that sort of thing. But simply the idea of encountering a teacher who not only didn't know what he was doing, but who even openly admitted to not knowing and tried to enlist their aid - that was enough to send them to their parents to complain.