Be Real not Perfect

This was not the way that I was going to start writing, but its appropriate and the sudden memory made me laugh.  Several months ago at my high school reunion, a vaguely familiar face reminisced that she’d told her husband about the time in junior high school I was (playfully) running  across the field to the gym and turned and ran face first into a pole.  Wham!  Ouch!

I mean really?  That’s the thing she remembered?  I added the playfully.  I hope she didn’t think that I did that out of habit.  But I remember the event well.  My face hurt, as did my pride.

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About a week ago, I read an Instagram post where the writer recalled an event from elementary school.  Her teacher had made her stand at the board for far too long and made a very big deal about her not knowing how to work a math problem.  I felt her pain.  I have witnessed that pain over the years many times.  It made her embarrassed.  It makes students embarrassed.  It usually makes a student not want to try.

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Almost a week ago, at the end of a lesson on fractions with my future teachers, one student raised her hand and said, “they don’t teach like this in schools.”  It’s been 27 years since I first saw that fraction lesson taught.  At the time I thought it was amazing and innovative.  I still do.  Her point though…we are supposed to do it different.

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What all of these stories has in common is that they highlight something that happens when we think something is to look one way and instead, it looks much different.  There is an emotion that rises out of the disconnect.  That emotion is usually some level of discomfort.

And time and time again, we are conditioned to believe that discomfort is bad.  Discomfort is embarrassing.  We feel discomfort when someone laughs at us.  We feel it when its clear they think we should know something that we don’t.  We also feel it when we don’t think an action will let us fit in.

I’m left to wonder, “Is that what school is about?”  Is it here to teach us the rules of the game (of life)?  But what if the rules change?  If school is done the same way it always has been, is it still able to teach those rules?  OK, I’m not going to go on too much of a tangent but I am witnessing an increase in the discomfort from students as a result of uncertainty.  Or as a result of their search for certainty. And its not an uncertainty of knowing, but of doing.  They wonder if their actions are ones that will be judged OK?

The news has been filled with articles of student stress and depression.  The prescriptions for anxiety are abundant.  The problem is, that the anxiety isn’t going away.

Instead of increasing the pressure for performance, why don’t we increase the opportunities for failure?  Why don’t we help students learn how to handle teaching a lesson correctly, but in a different way.  How about helping the student struggle with the problem instead of allowing them to stand in fear and embarrassment.  And how about letting them know that accidents happen and poles won’t always be waiting to jump in front of you and the pain can go away quickly.

There are a lot of ways to not be perfect.  I think its time we stop judging and pretending we should all be.