This I Believe: Surprising Yourself

I believe all students deserve the opportunity to surprise themselves and feel curious, creative and smart.

“Oh, look at the baby! She sat up! Isn’t she smart?” my grandmother is known to exclaim, offering her copious, arbitrary praise for each new infant member of the family. Even my grandmother’s Siamese cat Molly Malone knows fourteen words of English!  As a young child, my dad taught me what he had learned from my grandmother and made sure I would never forget: we come from smart people. But my dad has no idea how much this word would continue to confuse my waffling confidence, even into my adulthood. Would I ever be smart enough? How can anyone truly own their smartness until she has the opportunity to surprise herself?

In the third grade I found my favorite teacher, Mrs. Ersbo, and she shared with me the jack-in-the-box excitement of inquiry.  Each week Mrs. Ersbo posted a new research question, and since this was the mid 90s, before the convenience of smart phones and Wikipedia, I was forced to climb up to the top floor of our school to the library, and crack open its dusty, old set of primordial encyclopedias. I can’t tell you what the questions were that Mrs. Ersbo asked or what an example of an answer was. I could make up something about the world’s largest squid or the name of that one lung disease you can get from inhaling fine particles of silica and volcanic ash.  Instead what I remember most is Mrs. Ersbo encouraging me to wonder. Sure, my family had labeled me “smart” since birth, but I’d never been told I was curious; this I'd earned for myself.

I believe all students deserve recurring opportunities to recognize their curiosity and creativity.  But this takes a culture of confidence, and for some reason, schools are replacing these celebrations with other rituals: factual regurgitation, self-deprecation, and collection of data; and if you care too much about your brain and learning, especially as a 10^th grader, you’re branded as a try-hard. This is dangerous for students because it is the stories we tell ourselves that we believe in the most.

I believe all of my students have the right to feel curious, creative and smart. What do you mean you don’t want to feel creative, I ask my students in 10^th grade English class.  When does feeling smart, acting curious, knowing you can be brilliant ever put you at a disadvantage?  I’m not talking about arrogance, or when we use labels to cover our insecurities. I’m talking about the giddiness of articulating an idea or solving a problem, the glee of engineering a window to see into another world, or better yet, holding a new mirror up to a corner of this one.