teaching – Heather Hoyt

I’m currently teaching an in-person class. I’m new to teaching, and I’m doing the best that I can, but sometimes I don’t have a lot of confidence in myself. And that’s okay.

Because confidence isn’t particularly motivating. I can be very confident that I can do something, but still not want to do it at all. I can feel capable and skilled, but that doesn’t meant I get up and do it.

Courage can be what motivates me to actually do the thing.

Getting a PhD has taken a lot of courage. I had to apply, and I had to get letters of recommendation, and pick out a writing sample that I thought would be good enough. And now I submit to conferences and teach classes. I reach out to committee members, and I meet with my advisor regularly. I get harsh feedback sometimes, and I keep going.

But I don’t feel particularly good at any of this. I know I’m good enough to be here and do this thing, but I still have a lot to learn. I keep on growing.

Courage helps me in those days when I know I’m struggling, but that I go out and I try anyway. I have courage when I raise my hand to ask a question sometimes. When I meet a new person and have to engage in small talk. When I want to go home and crawl in bed and not face the things in front of me, but I instead get up and do my best.

If we wait until we are confident, then we don’t give ourselves the time and the space to learn. My best research is not when I figure it out on my own, but when I bring the beginning of an idea and share it with others. When I’m not confident, and I’m ready to learn and change, and I learn so much in that space.

So don’t seek out confidence. It will come when it’s ready, and it doesn’t ever need to be there at all. Instead, seek courage, to get up and try even when you don’t feel like it.

I got angry the other day. My kids were fighting over who got to sleep on the trampoline, and there was no combination that existed that would make them happy. If I made some kids happy, others started crying. And I was very frustrated.

I had to take a break and walk away. I thought of the problem a little more and realized that I couldn’t solve the problem as it currently existed. The solution I wanted was to make all my kids happy. But their preferences didn’t align in a way that I could do that successfully.

I could try to incentivize them in some way, such as letting the kids who didn’t sleep on the trampoline watch a movie. But that was just creating more problems–and those sorts of incentives can be extremely costly to me.

So I realized that the easiest way to solve the problem was to stop trying to make my kids happy. When I relaxed that requirement, a lot more solutions became available. And I no longer felt overwhelmed by an impossible problem.

When my kids were babies, when they cried, I needed to help them. But as they got older, they wanted more and more things. And sometimes what they want doesn’t make sense.

In a way, it’s easy to try to just give my kids what they want. Because then they stop whining, and I hate hearing them cry and complain. But they need to learn, more than they need satsification.

I need to provide food, clothing, shelter, education, love. I do not need to provide happiness, entertainment, treats, movies, video games, and solutions to all of their problems. My kids want more of me than I can give sometimes, but I can use that as a way to teach them to become more self-reliant, more grateful, more kind to each other, and harder workers.

Relatedly, I’ve stopped trying to make things fair all the time. Sometimes things just aren’t fair. Someone will get more birthday presents, or more dessert, or more time with friends. Sometimes I treat my kids differently because they are different, and because I don’t have the time and energy to equally distribute everything.

I still think fairness can be very important virtue. But fairness as a virtue doesn’t mean noticing when someone else has more and wanting more as well. That selfish fairness is not usually helpful or virtuous. What is better is using fairness as a way to share, to help those who have less, and to notice people who are left out.

I don’t need to be the sole distributor of fairness in my family. I don’t need to keep giving my kids more and more and more. I can teach them to share with each other instead, to be grateful for what they have, and to be okay even if someone has more than they do.

Two of the kids slept on the trampoline. Two of them who wanted to did not. The ones that did not were not happy about it. But I explained my reasoning, and then I let them feel however they wanted to feel. And honestly, once I made the decision, they weren’t as upset as I feared they would be. They don’t actually expect to always get what they want all the time. But if they think they can get it by crying and complaining, they are more likely to cry and complain.

Sometimes being the best mom I can be means not making everyone happy, explaining to my kids why I can’t give them what they would like, and holding to my decisions. That’s teaching them.

Tag: teaching

Courage is better than confidence

My job is not to make my kids happy