Mistakes

I started writing and then deleted everything twice before this round. Third time’s the charm. Hopefully. The reason is, I wanted it to be right. Not perfect, necessarily. I don’t care if my prose is 100% flawless, or if it sounds exactly the way I want it to. It doesn’t have to be the most moving story every written, or the funniest. I just want it to be right. Not perfect, just honest and good.

I wanted it to be well done.

This is true of me when I teach, too. I want my lessons to be well done, my feedback to be the right kind so that it’s beneficial to the student. Obviously, all of this is a good thing. I should want to do my job well. And I do. Desperately.

But I make mistakes. I forget to remind the kids of something important, or my explanations fall short, or my instructions don’t make sense. I miscount the points on a quiz, or grade an essay to hard or to easy. Situations come up in class, and only afterwards do I realize there was a different way I could’ve handled it that would’ve been a million times better.

And when one of those things inevitably happens, there’s always another just around the corner. And another after that. And another. And so on. Mistake after mistake after mistake till it feels like those are all I can see.

When I make a mistake like that, my CT always says something like, “It’s okay, just do it next time.” The second part is easy. I can change what I did wrong. The first part is harder. The knowing that it’s okay. That my students aren’t going to fail because of me. That it’s okay to just realize you messed up and fix it the next time around.

I’ve learned all kinds of things. I know how to write lesson plans, how to create assessments, how to explain things five different ways, and I’ve learned that even if I repeat myself multiple times, then have somebody else say what I just said, there will still be that one kid who doesn’t know what’s going on. I’ve learned that no matter how well you thought you knew a text, when you go to teach it you can always discover something new about it. There are lots of things I’ve learned, and lots more I’m still learning.

And the hardest thing to learn is how to make mistakes.