I have been experiencing a strange phenomenon the past few years regarding how I view myself and the world, so the timing of this class feels particularly poetic for me. I am in my eighth year of teaching, my fourth year of motherhood, and, having recently celebrated my thirtieth birthday, I am embarking on my fourth decade of life. I guess my age, motherhood, and teaching experience have gained me the credibility I longed for as a teenager and young teacher, yet I feel less qualified than ever to speak as an authority about anything.
When I was thirteen, I knew everything. Seriously. I had already worked for two years as the bookkeeper for a small business, and when they were audited my records were shown to be flawless. People--teachers, my parents, my parents' friends--were always remarking how mature I was, and I felt it. I offered advice freely, not just to friends, but to relatives, or any adult who would listen to me. I wrote poetry, and a three-part novel. I was published for the first time and, thanks to my family's internet access--in 1992, back before we all used the world wide web--I posted my work and responded to others' on Prodigy's bulletin boards (which, appropriately, were quite similar to today's blogs). I was confident in who I was and ready to share it with the world.
What I know now, though, as a thirty-year-old mother and teacher, is that, unlike my internet service, I was not ahead of my time. Anyone with basic math skills can keep records and pay taxes. I may have written a three-part novel, but without realizing the significance and history of all the term implies. The publications that paid me for my work were so obscure that I don't even remember their names. And, though I didn't know it at the time, the advice I offered others was usually unsolicited and often unappreciated.
I thought I knew who I was as a teenager, even as I was questioning my religious upbringing (much to the chagrin of my father, a minister). I thought I knew who I was when I chose my major (over and over) in college. When I chose to get married. When I began teaching. When I washed and hung the tiny clothes in the closet of the room we painted purple and green in anticipation of our first child. But at thirty, I have begun realizing how much I don't know. About being married. About parenting children. About teaching literature, when students ask contextual questions about history that I don't know how to answer, or when I have to account for the many different ways of knowing in literature and explain what IB values and whether it is "right." About politics, when I am asked to make a decision that embodies moral questions alongside issues of health care, education, and economics, only one of which I feel qualified to say anything about. About the Bible, which I ostensibly "studied" every Sunday my entire childhood.
In short, over the last five years I have begun to realize how much I don't know. I once thought my superior ACT and SAT scores, my high GPAs that I only sometimes had to work for, and my ability to out-argue most of my friends and family all pointed to my great intelligence. Only in the past five years have I swallowed my pride enough to acknowledge that my intellectual capacity does not relate to what I actually know (or retain), and that wisdom is another thing altogether. All pretty embarrassing to admit to my colleagues, and to publish online. I am clearly not there yet on the wisdom bit.
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