Writer's Block: Life's lessons

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In the first 15 minutes of the first time our class went to ice-skating, I was scared. I mean, slipping about on ice with knives on your feet is scary. I'd never even seen ice-skating in person before. I didn't know it would be cold, so I crept around the edges of the rink, holding on so I wouldn't fall.

You told me, in those first fifteen minutes that I was too scared to learn, pulled me off the ice and called my parents and told them I could no longer attend this activity. You weren't even the ice-skating teacher, just my homeroom teacher.

Too scared to learn, you told me. I was five. I still can't ice skate, and I don't really care, but I believed I was too scared to do anything (despite fighting against it) for twenty years.

I'm pretty amazing, but what, I wonder, would I have been without you? Maybe even more.

Believe it or not, I think of you every time I hear a couple of lines from Fairytale of New York:

I could have been someone.
Well, so could anyone.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/lindalee_/]

Teachers can make or break a learning experience, and what they say can seep into the rest of our psyche so easily, it's shocking.


Please read this... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/heidi-grant-halvorson-phd/girls-confidence_b_828418.html

[sqwook.livejournal.com]

re: this article, especially "... girls take it as sign that they aren't "good" and "smart""

-- Oh, man. The fear that other people will think that I'm not good or smart enough... I do ok on emotional intelligence in lots of areas, but this area still could use tons of work.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Impostor syndrome. Geek Feminism has had a lot to say about that.

[malle-babbe.livejournal.com]

I totally hear you on the whole "skill as a mark of character" front. I'd get frustrated to tears over math as a kid, and then had to deal with the "shame" of not just being The GT Kid Who Sucked At Math, but being The GT Kid Who Cried Over The Fact She Sucked At Math. I had folks rag on me years afterward.

The article that lindalee linked reminds me of an article in the NYT on women who weren't involved in athletics as kids or young adults getting into long distance running, and being truly shocked at how well they took to it. I have had a similar revelation since taking up skiing a year ago.

I have gone through driving to the ski slopes with no small amount of "what am I doing" on my mind and being profoundly ungainly on skis to having the breakthrough of getting physically coordinated and more nimble.

For all of the backlash that Amy Chua got on the whole "Tiger Mother" shtick, she does bring up a good point on challenging the idea of intelligence and skill as something inherent vs. something that is built up over time and with practice. Not to say that I didn't find tales of her past as a Type A, short fuse, ragey yuppie tiresome.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

Man, I don't think I ever had a teacher that traumatized me that badly. Then again, when I was in first grade, I broke my teacher's foot. So perhaps the trauma just flowed in the other direction.

[ldybastet.livejournal.com]

:( Teachers... Things they say to kids carry so much weight, and as kids we're inclined to believe that anything they say is the Truth, because... well, they're teachers!

I stopped singing when I was 12 because my homeroom teacher told me to go over to the boy's side during music class to back them up. No explanation other than that we were running out of boys with stable and non-changing voices. ... It made me believe that my voice revealed my deep secret wish to have been born a boy instead of a girl to anyone who heard it. (In reality it was probably as simple as me being the only girl who wasn't a squeaky, air-leaking soprano.) It made me stop singing when anyone could hear me. 30 years later, I'm still too scared to sing around people, even though I am at this point in my life rather open about not being comfortable having a female body.

Authority figures like teachers and parents really shape us. Sometimes it's good, sometimes, not so much.

And yes, you are amazing. :) I always enjoy reading your posts.

[sqwook.livejournal.com]

Who does that, to a five-year-old, on slippery ice, on the first day, in the first 15 minutes?

It totally reminds me of my swimming classes, though, at probably the same age. It had the opposite outcome, and clearly a teacher with a little more flexibility. I was terrified to put my head into the water. To get the (literal) gold star that day, you had to put your whole head under. So after much back and forth, at the very end of the day, (I seem to remember everyone else already being gone, but that might be my faulty memory and the fact that I am definitely the center of my life and its stories) I managed to put my head halfway in, up to my nose or so. I got half a star. That seemed equitable to me, then and now.

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

I have something I would like to say to this, but I can't do it while logged in. *hugs*

Thank you for this. It's something for me to think about.

[malle-babbe.livejournal.com]

I am always puzzled by the fact that there seems to be no early testing in elementary education programs to weed out folks who have no patience.

[kdsorceress.livejournal.com]

At least where I go (Lesley University, which has elementary ed as one of its major focuses) they don't really do anything to weed out people who suck with kids, as far as I can tell. Like, you get to your student teaching, and get your first real serious every day classroom experience, but that's the last semester of senior year, so you're pretty much fucked if you want to change majors then.

~Sor

[malle-babbe.livejournal.com]

The seems to be the SOP for Education majors all over. Which is so bass-ackward... It isn't good for the Elem. Ed majors, or the kids...

[bethynyc.livejournal.com]

I had to answer this in my own journal, because it would be to long here.

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

Holy shit. D:

I always thought I picked up ice skating pretty quickly -- but I still spent my first fifteen minutes clinging to the side of the rink. (And I was a lot older than five.)