Embracing Vulnerability

Putting oneself out there is terrifying.  It opens ourselves up to vulnerability. Failure. Rejection. Looking foolish.  All very real possibilities when making oneself vulnerable.   I try to avoid these things, we all do. Yet, I am learning that unless I actually put myself in these (potentially) horribly awkward scenarios on a somewhat regular basis, I am not very happy.  I am comfortable, certainly.  Maybe even content.  But not happy.  Not proud, not energised, not inspired.

Circle of Comfort = Circle of Fear

The circle of...
Photo by Zachary Spears on Unsplash

Thank you Valerie Koch, for putting yourself out there, and for sharing your own thoughts on the subject (and for the timely reminder of our #EagleEd Blogging Challenge).

Like you, I was also inspired by Stephenie Zamora's article, The Art of Putting Yourself Out There. I loved your honest reflections about the effectiveness of motivational posters in your room. (To this day I can visualise one particular poster hanging in my high school English classroom, which I must have re-read dozens of times.  Unfortunately, "The Little Giant" poster was illustrating a rhetorical device, that of the oxymoron, and not something a bit more profound...)

I also like how you mention you are intentional about letting students know you are trying something for the first time, and that you are also learning.  I think for many teachers, letting on that we don't know something is terrifying, as it opens us up a vulnerability that we have been trained to think is not desirable.  We are the 'teachers'--we should know more than the 'students' (or at least this has historically been the expectation).

It is really uncomfortable standing if front of a group of students (or your peers) and saying, 'I don't know.' And I don't mean 'I don't know' about something unknowable (meaning of life type questions). I mean not knowing about things that one might (rightly) expect us to know, due to our job title or age.

Coding Club

I experienced this discomfort when I ran a Coding Club for upper primary students earlier this year.  For many of them, coding and video game playing is their primary interest and past time.  They have logged thousands of hours and their social lives revolve around this interest. As a busy mother of young children and full time Lower Primary Tech Integrator, Coding and Gaming were not on the top of my list of previous experiences.  Going into my first club I had played few video games beyond Tetris, and had only experimented with a few coding apps and websites during Hour of Code.

I learned quite a bit, by asking questions of the 'experts' in the group, by working right alongside students, by running through problem solving strategies when they/we got stuck. In this regard, everyone in the club learned something. I also underestimated how big the gap was in my students' prior knowledge and self motivation. I had challenged students to create their own game or simple program in Scratch, but with the added complexity of combining certain key strokes with Makey Makey kits. It was perhaps too open and not scaffolded enough for all students to succeed at the task; although many did--even those who had never used Scratch beyond playing others' games.

First Drafts

Photo by "My Life Through A Lens" on Unsplash

Austin Kleon's blogpost on the necessity of First Drafts allowed me to think about my first attempt at Coding Club as my own version of a first draft, and that initial attempts not being stellar are okay, as long as there is a will to improve. I will do my best to follow Austin's own advice to himself:

“It doesn’t matter if it’s good right now, it just needs to exist.”