Note to Self at the End of the Semester

I hate annual evaluations! 

Now that I've gotten that out of my chest, I can think of why I should not hate them. Hear me out. This is something I've been trying to do lately. No, I cannot think of a reason to love self-evaluations but I do appreciate self-reflection, and vulnerability, and transparency, and failure, and resilience, and self-evaluations are opportunities to experience and experiment with all of them. Some of these words have become rather popular lately, but that doesn't mean they are any less important. These words have changed me and the way I teach. The last two years have been fruitful because they have been "failurefull." Yes, I've just made that word up, and I'm proud of it. The rules are important, but sometimes we should break them. This is not something I could have written a decade ago. 

That's why I'm writing this. FIU has asked me to use this system they call Panther180, and I'm sure they have good reasons to do so, but it means that my teaching narrative is limited to 750 words. A few years ago, I would have complied. Today, I'm writing this instead, and submitting the URL to this blog as my teaching narrative, which I'm sure will meet the 750-word constraint, so technically I'm complying while transgressing, just a little bit.

I've been thinking of, writing about, and researching failure lately, and what I've realized is that accepting failure as part of the creative process leads to innovation, and freedom, and peace--and even conducive to gut health. Over the past two years, I'm become less afraid of trying out new teaching methods, and more open to feedback that's needed but not always wanted. I imagine this is what stand-up comedians experience when they try a new joke. Maybe the first time they tell it, it bombs. But then they revise the timing, the construction, the delivery, and they share the revisions with other comics who suggest more revisions, and then it bombs a bit less and less, until the joke is followed by raucous laughter with one particular audience in Kansas but it still bombs when told to a group of South Floridians. 

Writing is never full-proof.

I've learned that perfectionism is not the same as mastery; perfectionism puts us in competition with others but mastery pushes us to do better than we did yesterday, while also realizing that endurance and practice will get us close to but never to the cusp of mastery. Flo (pictured above) chases her orange Frisbee joyfully and masterfully every single time. Sometimes she catches it midair and other times she misses it by this much. The end result does not matter to her at all, but every time she revises her approach to get her closer to that frisbee, closer to mastery.

And so I've found myself taking more risks as a teacher. I started teaching at a woman's prison last January, and yes, I walked into that classroom carrying a heavy load of skepticism and stereotypes that I'm still trying to mold into understanding, but I get a bit better at it every day. For the first time, I taught a class where grades were not part of the conversation at all. I'd been wondering if that was possible. And now I know it is. I discovered that in the unlikeliest of places. In that freezing classroom, surrounded by peeling paint and eternal dampness, we focused on building friendships based on intellectual and emotional growth, and that's what I tried to do with my college and incarcerated students: create a safe space where they were given opportunities to fail and grow. 

I'm not saying I'm now great at it. I'm just saying I'm better at it that I was yesterday.

And that's enough.

Tania