School again

The beginning of school this year feels different than years past, and I noticed today that I wasn't nervous about my classes the way I usually have been on the first day of school. I think I'm a reasonably confident person. But for most of my working life, for some reason I've never been able to quite shake the feeling that I'm faking it, that I don't really know what I'm doing and that eventually everybody's going to find me out.

Fortunately, one of the comforts of being an adult (as in grown-up, not as in adult movies) is that you learn that nobody really knows what they're doing. Pretty much everyone is good at something, but pretty much nobody is good at everything. It's like in The Sims, when you made a person you had a set amount of good stuff to spread around, and you could choose which characteristics you want to make strong and which you don't care about as much. I think that people are kind of like that too. And I guess I've accepted that whatever my shortcomings, that I am an actual real-life teacher.

So now I'm left with a dilemma of sorts, where I can look around me and see that everyone is good at certain things and is just scraping by on the rest of it. There's a lot of teaching type stuff that I'm good at, but I'm still an organizational disaster. Like today, in one of my classes, I asked everyone what their book numbers were, even though I'd written them down last spring when I gave them out, because I knew that would be much faster than my looking for that piece of paper. The dilemma is whether I tell myself to settle, and decide that everyone has shortcomings and this one is just as okay as anyone else's, or do I push myself and try to become better at the things that I'm not good at.

I think we find ourselves making decisions like that often, whether consciously or not. It's an easier question for my students, because for the most part they don't really know what they're good at yet. But for someone in their mid 50's, is it now okay to say, in the words of the great philosopher Popeye, "I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam," a finished product, or am I still trying to grow?

I think for me it has to be that latter, and the great thing about teaching is that you don't really even need to try. Because no matter how well you plan a lesson, kids have semi-developed brains, and so are kind of kooky and unpredictable and you never know what's going to come out of their mouths. And if trying to explain something that seems perfectly obvious to you to someone who finds the same thing mysterious or illogical or just plain wrong doesn't make you grow, I don't what will.