Week 9/10 (I think?): Humility & Resilience

"Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real." - Thomas Merton

Admitting you're wrong is hard. It's bad enough to admit to yourself that you're wrong, but to admit you're wrong publicly, or to get something wrong in front of a class is worse. I know I struggle with that a lot, so I don't give specific answers in class nearly as often as I might otherwise. Any kind of discussion or opinion-based something is ok, because I'm willing to have my mind changed. But I hate being flat-out wrong about something I thought I was right about.

It's kind of funny that we're supposed to write about the difference between humility and confidence and how you reconcile the two since we had a mini-discussion about this a few weeks ago on Monday night. In my opinion, confident humility (humble confidence?) is about being confident in what you know and what you believe, but acknowledging that you're not infallible and some people know more about some things than you do, or maybe ever will. There is absolutely nothing wrong with confidence, as long as it's not cockiness or arrogance. As a teacher, you have to be confident in your subject. There's nothing worse than a teacher who obviously doesn't know what he/she is talking about.

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Resilience

"In order to succeed people need a sense of self-efficacy strung together with resilience to meet the inevitable obstacles and inequities of life." Albert Bandura

I think the biggest thing that can be done to prepare teachers for the difficulties in the profession is by getting them in schools as early as possible and as often as possible. That's one thing my mom has commented on. She was a music ed major, but she didn't get into the schools until her senior year, so she didn't realize she didn't want to teach until then, and then it was pretty much too late. It's really good that Luther gets people in the school so early.

I think to a certain extent the ed programs at schools should be more challenging. The old saying about how those who can't do, teach is too accurate some places. As I said earlier, I think Luther does a good job, but the ed programs should be at least as difficult as any other program, if not harder. You not only have to understand your concentration, you have to be able to get others to understand it.