Experience

My friend John Swanson wrote an interesting blog about experience.

My takeaway: If you do something for a while, you might get good at it. And if you’re good at it, then it might be a gift you can share with others.

I spent 35 years in classrooms with students. Recently I’ve had a chance to talk with a couple of people about some things I learned.

One example…I learned it was helpful to remember learning can be frightening. And not just for kids in a classroom.

Real learning always causes some sort of behavior change. Otherwise, it’s not learning. And change can be scary. It’s a lot easier to stick with the status quo, with the familiar, than to risk some sort of unknown change that might accompany new learning.

Also, learning means admitting you don’t know something, or that you can’t do something. That’s not an easy thing.

So when we ask someone to learn something new, whether it’s algebra or the real horrors of human trafficking, it’s good to start by remembering we’re asking them to do something that might be scary.

Might be, doesn’t have to be. There are ways to mitigate the fear and ultimately, hopefully, to make learning enjoyable. But we don’t do that by pretending the fear doesn’t exist.

Think about something you resisted learning about. Can you identify the fear?