They Like to Be Challenged--A Paragraph a Day

Teaching is a particularly frustrating art, mostly because it's so often impossible to choose who your students are.  So many young people these days are being raised to shy away from challenges that it can be very frustrating to try to teach them in a classroom, because they don't respond well at all to being asked to better themselves, to learn more, to improve their skills.  But what I find to be a pretty common phenomenon is that once I do start to challenge them, once I do start to ask them to be better than they were yesterday, they respond quite well--most students really want to get better, and they're simply hoping that someone will help them to improve their skills and knowledge.  I know a lot of teachers who really never ask young people to do any difficult work, thus dooming them to stay at their current level.  But when we ask them to stretch their limits and offer them a safe place to do so--free from ridicule and mocking--they find within themselves the resources they need to get better at what they do, to improve both their knowledge and their skills.  If we want people to be better, Goethe said, we have to treat them as if they already are the people they have the potential to be, rather than dooming them to mediocrity by only expecting them to perform at levels that they've already reached.

Very, Very Early--A Paragraph a Day

I went running just before four this morning.  It's one of the most wonderful things in the world, to go running super early like that when the world around me is mostly still asleep and everything's quiet and peaceful.  It's also one of the more difficult things in the world, actually putting on my shorts and shirt and socks and shoes and stepping out the door into the cold in order to run five miles or so before I've even truly woken up.  I wish it were easy to get up super early and to get outside and run in the brisk morning air because if it were easy, I'd do it all the time.  Unfortunately, though, going out and running isn't usually what I most feel like doing when I first get up.  I like eating breakfast, for example, and drinking a cup of coffee, and relaxing a bit to try to get myself mentally ready for the day ahead.  Once I get out there and I'm into the run, it's a great experience, but it sure tends to be rough getting started.  It's like a lot of things in life--I end up loving it and it's certainly good for me and I have a great sense of accomplishment once I've finished the run, but getting started seems to take an inordinate amount of effort, mostly mentally.  So many things in life are like this, and I recognized the pattern in many things that I've done and that I haven't done--sometimes things are so hard to get started that I simply don't get started at all, so I never get the chance to love doing them, and I never get the sense of satisfaction from having done them.  My hope is that as life goes on I miss fewer and fewer things because I'm afraid to start them--I need to take more balanced risks as I get older, not fewer, for now is a time of my life when I've spent years learning how to deal with setbacks when and if they happen.