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.

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.

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.