"Not being afraid to look stupid has great benefits."
Inside Higher Ed "When anthropologist Lauren Herckis tried to figure out why new teaching strategies developed at Carnegie Mellon were not being widely adopted, she found that one of the reasons instructors were hesitant was because their “No. 1 challenge was to make sure that they were not an embarrassment to [themselves] in front of students.”
"For some, I can imagine that this manifests as a fear at looking stupid. In others, it may be a desire to appear smart.
"I sure do remember walking into a classroom consumed with the fear of looking stupid.
"It’s happened both as a student and an instructor. As a student, it was part and parcel of the writing workshops of both college and graduate school where my work was going to be the sole focus of everyone’s attention for an hour. What if my submission was terrible, just shamefully bad? My hands would tremble beneath the seminar table, waiting for the first verdicts to come in.
"As a TA in grad school, I was terrified my students would out me as a fraud. For that reason, early on I stuck to the script of the textbook, sometimes spending entire periods just reading it out loud to them, occasionally adding emphasis to particular sentences where it seemed appropriate." . . .
A blog by John Warner, author of the story collection Tough Day for the Army, and a novel, The Funny Man, on teaching, writing and never knowing when you're going to be asked to leave.
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