EATING CROW
Life is full of incidents that teach humility, and I’ve met quite a lot of them. Being the kind of person who charges ahead with my own agenda, led by an innate curiosity and dogged determination, I often get smacked upside the head with the facts. Sometimes things are just harder than I expect; sometimes I’m not as well-equipped as I’d like to be.
There are at least a couple of ways to react to such smack-downs. I could retreat and avoid new challenges, or I could butt my way through or across obstacles to some form of new understanding about my limitations. This appears to be my preferred approach.
My husband and I had a 16-year-old exchange student from Vietnam in 2002 and 2003 who stubbornly resisted the American educational system he came to benefit from, because it didn’t emphasize rote learning and calculation over creativity and innovation. He ridiculed his teachers and insisted he knew a better way to learn. He insisted the only things worth knowing could be memorized and hinted perhaps he’d already succeeded in that task.
It’s easier to learn if you don’t believe you know everything already, though. Minh’s attitude was partly a function of his age, I think, but that conviction can outlast adolescence. Mine lasted until I became a parent and realized I was ill-prepared to be a mom. There would be no memorizing of parenting facts to get me through that challenge. Fortunately, I was surrounded by good mothers, who humbled me with their wisdom.
My kids were also exceedingly smart individuals—it was hard to pull much over on them. Learning on the job was tricky, but we all managed to grow up, and I count myself lucky to be their mom. Entering a new job or career is humbling, all on its own. But entering a new career teaching science to pregnant teenagers without classroom teaching experience was a pretty intense lesson in humility as well. Humility is an underrated quality, but it’s one of a teacher’s most valuable assets.
“Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know.”
~ Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
My understanding of the importance of humility in the classroom grew slowly. There was a lot of butting my bullheaded expectations against those of students in the meantime. It took me some years to recognize that what I thought I was doing—illuminating science concepts my district required me to teach, when I was required to teach them—was not always what students needed. At least, not only that. Until I started paying attention to what the girls needed in addition to science education, I was just yammering into a black hole.
The difficulty wasn’t just because I was 55 before I entered the classroom, but it was probably worse because of that. All teachers would do well to understand that teaching is not just a one-way transmission and memorization of facts. Teaching is similar to parenting, in that teachers teach best when they’re open to hearing and understanding student needs, just as parents learn to attend to their individual children’s needs.
Teaching, for me, was complicated by the challenge of discovering what each girl needed in 54-minute increments and responding in the best way possible. Every student was unique, and what worked with one didn’t work with another. I spent a lot of time trying, failing, and trying again. I learned to discriminate between effective lessons and those that just didn’t work, and admitting failure made all the difference. It’s still hard to admit when I’m wrong, but I’m better at it than I used to be. In the end, I’d rather charge ahead toward an audacious goal with only tentative plans and risk eating crow than risk nothing at all.
https://janiceairhart.com/2024/02/18/eating-crow/
Janice Airhart has been a medical technologist, biomedical research tech, freelance writer and editor, science teacher to pregnant teens, bioscience program representative, and adjunct English professor. Her memoir, Mother of My Invention: A Motherless Daughter Memoir, won the Minerva Rising 2021 Memoir Contest and was released in November 2022. Her essays and articles have appeared in The Sun, The Science Teacher, Lutheran Woman Today, Concho River Review, Story Circle Network’s Real Women Write 2021 and 2023 anthologies, and One Woman’s Day blog, among others.
