Failing Gloriously

Wood-floored hall of library (specifically Poets House in NYC)

 
If I had known anything about teaching interviews, I would have bowed out. Or at least that's what the talking head version of me, filled with hindsight, says from on high. I had aced the first interview, I thought. They were enamored with my writing and the previous teaching jobs on my resume. But this is a story of the second interview.

My second interview was in a windowless gym separated by rolling dividers for the three grade levels. I walked to the back where there was a table set up with a few older-looking folks who were the teachers, two folks who were kind but didn't pay me much attention. The 'classroom' itself was a bunch of circular tables where a few teenagers were stationed, the majority black and Latino.

I was meant to facilitate the warmup activity. There was a game we'd played in a summer program I facilitated where kids are divided into three groups, line up, and they get to write one word of a sentence on a big piece of paper on the wall. The game is timed, and you have to pass the marker to the next person - you can play it where the firs team who finishes 'wins' or the team with the best/funniest sentence 'wins'. I should have known when the paper kept falling down from the dividers that this wasn't going to go well.

Trying to get them into a line was the first thing that failed. And then there was the passing of the marker; most folks were more focused on their phones and I am a terrible disciplinarian. 'Clap once if you can hear me!' and 'Would you put that phone away?' don't really work when you're nervous. I must have looked panic-stricken when I turned to one of the other facilitators; to their credit, they tried to bail me out.

I realize now that there was no reason for them to trust me. I didn’t look like them and I didn’t come from their neighborhoods. And since I was a newbie, they could do whatever they wanted without much consequences. Picture the most sitcom-like experience you could have as a teacher – a substitute teacher at that.

I burst out onto the darkened street afterward, my toes curling in my shoes from embarrassment. It was the first time I felt like I had gone out of my body to watch myself tank so badly. But something about it was also hysterical to me. When I got on the train, I couldn’t help but smile. It went so badly it was funny. There was no way in hell that I was going to get the position. And yet the world hadn’t tumbled into a fiery abyss behind me. I had only metaphorically died of embarrassment.

I’ve felt like I spent a whole year and a half unlearning the idea of perfectionism. During college, it was a prized skill no matter what group I was in – even amongst artists and activists, achievement was highly correlated to your value. And before that it was a survival tactic: if I did a lot of stuff, it meant I didn’t have to be at home very often. But after school ended and I couldn’t get a job for five months, I had to find a new strategy.

I’m still not all that great at appreciating my failures but now it’s easier to see them as experiments, moments that I can put in my back pocket for later. When, later that year, I attended my first birth as a doula, I tried to keep this experience in mind – though I may have been embarrassed or unprepared, I did all that I could with what I had. Even if I was failing, I wanted to fail gloriously. And be easier on myself in the process.

Blueprint on Mastery

"I expressed to Rare Groove that, to me, music is like a beach.  If you were to go to the beach and pick up as much sand as possible with your hands, that would be the most music knowledge and experience that any one person would ever have.  Just as you can never pick up all the sand, you can never learn all there is to know about music.  But instead of letting that fact discourage me, I use it as inspiration to go back to the beach every day and appreciate it for what it is and the breadth of knowledge it has to offer.  I can’t quit going to the beach that music represents because I love it, and because I will never master it."

- Blueprint, "A Birthday and an Anniversary"

Humility in Environmental Science Class

My environmental science professor asks hardball questions.

I finished presenting on environmental justice movements - thankfully slowed down from the double speed I had while practicing it - and was waiting for the silence to break with questions and comments. My professor started to ask about prioritizing a sewage pelletizing plant for the whole city over moving it away from vulnerable communities. I was prepared to jump up in the defense of the untold masses of jobless people of color that have to live near all of NYC's sewage treatment. After all, no one wants to live near that. But as he went on, I started to see that he was asking a much more complicated question than that.

The plant is already there; sewage needs to be processed. These are two irreducible facts. The latent question is "What should be done? How do we make it right?" Someone in the back suggested regulation (which I am also a big fan of) rather than creating a blame game. But there's more to it than that. Systematic oppression, yes, but also the needs of small communities and whether they should be taken over the needs of a larger group. Somewhere in my notes I have it written down as "the tragedy of the commons" - resources for some "must" be sacrificed to suit the larger needs of others.

It's complicated. My instinct is to fight about it, to ask why there isn't one in such and such neighborhood. But then where? Environmental justice work can't simply say let's spirit it away from the Bronx and put it in Brooklyn. But what I took away from this class presentation was not even really about environmental work at all. It was the idea that sometimes the simplest-looking things have the most complicated solutions. And, more importantly, that we can't just believe we're right.

That simple proposition, the idea that it's necessary to have this be somewhere, made me stutter step as I thought about what could feasibly be done. And I realized that in some cases humility is needed, even when fighting for social justice and other venerable causes. Sometimes it's necessary to just listen and consider.

Best Learned Lessons from Being Abroad

I talked a bit about appreciating my American identity while being abroad, but now that we are down to the very last wire, I wanted to share some of the other lessons that I've taken away from this trip. Here it goes:

Learning with Humility

Expectation is the enemy of humility.

I don't know if that's a quote by anyone famous, but it's something that I've put away in my mental filing cabinet for whenever I feel like I've failed at learning something. And trust me, on this trip, there have been many times when I've felt like I've failed.

That's the major problem with starting anything - when you're first learning as a child, you have some natural humility in that you don't feel like you must be perfect at everything right away. However, when you're an adult learning something (say, a hard language like Bengali), you might feel sensitive to the fact that you're not "getting it" right away. Hence today's post: some tips on how to regain some measure of humility and feel at ease with your learning process.

My 5 Major Ramadan Activities

Homemade burfi! It's a sweet milk cake.

Since I talked about fasting earlier, I thought I should talk about what I've actually been doing during this month - often, people assume that I'm not doing anything but feeling hungry/thirsty all the time! Instead, here are the most common things I'm doing each day.

1. Sleeping. Of course, this is because I have the privilege of being on vacation during Ramadan, but since we are getting up and eating pretty early in the morning, I take it as my cue to sleep in a little bit each day rather than staying awake from 3:30am onward.

2. Plunging into work. In some ways, I think I get the most done when I'm fasting - no necessary breaks for food/drink! But seriously, investing yourself in a project or reflection really does make the time positive and strengthening.

3. Reading Quran and learning more about religion. This one is a pretty obvious choice during the holy month, but since it is my first time being immersed in an Islamic culture outside of my own private learning, I thought I'd reiterate how big of a learning experience this is.

4. Cooking! Or, more accurately, watching and sometimes assisting people who are cooking. I mentioned before that I found it pretty interesting that we continue to cook and prepare a lot of foods when we ourselves cannot eat, but it is a regular part of the day to fry foods, make curries, and be in the presence of both food and water. Normal life doesn't stop when we are fasting, it just becomes markedly different.

5. Remarking at the complete normalcy of day-to-day life. Ok, not really an 'activity,' but coming from a Western country where only a few people are fasting to seeing everyone do it (regardless of what work they're performing or their living situation) is pretty astounding. It intrigues me to think of the unified group of people fasting and how their lives are affected in similar and different ways by observance of this ritual.

Teach Yourself! 7 Lessons in Self-Education

My English advisor often tells me that you're only going to learn what you teach yourself - formalized lesson plans and reading lists are great and all, but if you're not engaging with the material on your own, it won't really stick. And I think that's very important in relation to the articles I've written this week on Asian Americans; that material rarely gets taught in the classroom, but is more often something that we have to approach on our own. So, today I want to generalize the process of learning something new. Whether that's learning about the social history of Asian Americans in the US or learning how to roller skate or learning a new language, here are 7 tips to getting yourself on the road to learn.

Extra Hairballs

I feel like magic and anxiety and annoyance and laughter. Yes, all at once.
There's a cluster of emotions falling in at the end of the year. The idea that maybe I should branch out and improve my life, the feeling that maybe I want to embrace something old... the classic feeling of frustration as teachers scramble to put in everything at the last minute. I am working towards the end of the year, which is in 4 days [not counting weekends] and I really feel like I need to police everyone again. And again. And again.
I like the idea of closure right now; it feels good to say that there's an end to these clubs (at least until needing to help them again) and that there's an end to the tests and the projects and the winding road of grade hassles [still need to talk about that with some teachers] Yet, at the same time, there's this grating nervousness that 'maybe I didn't do so well this year' or 'maybe I'm not good enough for this college' or 'maybe this' and 'maybe that.'
And, at the end of it all, I just feel like school has taken up way too much of my life. I know that I'm going to "school" in the summer, but learning has never been the problem for me. It's the fact that school itself is an oppressive environment for creativity/personal enjoyment. It's wonderful to have people around you and to be struggling together and whatnot... but how long do we have to struggle for things that are not ours? I really don't care about many of the classes I'm taking [thankfully, next year, most of those classes are gone].
I want to learn to be me in many ways; I want to work out and make my body what I want it to be, I want to learn what I am personally by exploration... but all of these things seem so lofty, right? I feel like magic sometimes when I discover how much has changed even in the last 3 months. I realize that I was completely different by going through my journal entries and remembering... I am notorious for record-keeping.
My "lofty goals" became something like:
- Purge room of unnecessary stuff
- Revisit knitting
- Write!
- Work out
- Play video games
And other things that are possibly too boring. Mundanities really do make the world 'real.'
In the end, this summer I really am going to be able to rediscover myself - if I could do some soul-searching in the brief period since Heathy left [April], then I can definitely secure myself over free time.
My Triple Threat Plan will pan out!