I have been swing dancing for the past 20 years, and in that time I have gone through a non stop learning experience.
Along with my own nonstop learning experience, I am also constantly observing other people going through their own arc of learning. Some definitely do it faster than others. We tend to ascribe this faster learning rate to being “smarter” or “having talent,” but there is an important element that is seldom mentioned, and that is how “humility management” figures into personal growth and improvement.
A fairly common element of doing something new is the first day when you have the “freshman experience.” You feel awkward and vulnerable. You have to defer to the expertise of others. Your sense of social standing, on a purely baboon troupe pecking order level, is severely shaken.
Sometimes this state of vulnerability leads to lots of fun and discovery. Other times, it is the beginning of a traumatic experience. A big part of teaching skill is managing this state of emotional vulnerability on the part of students, not just having mastery of the material.
In many situations, the “freshman experience” is deliberately exploited and abused for various reasons, or worse, it is made extremely unpleasant as a quick and dirty form of motivation to make you want to work hard and rise out of that level as soon as possible. If you make mistakes, or do not keep up with the class, this can lead to traumatic disapproval.
If you have ever been through a traumatic freshman experience, it may have been very effective in making you work hard, but it has this common side effect: you will tend to not want to repeat it any time soon. This prevents many people from trying new things for the rest of their lives. That loss of control is just too terrifying to revisit.
I often find myself dancing with people who are scared to death of being caught making a mistake. They see everyone, myself included, as a harsh judge. The work feverishly to do the steps in a precise conformity with what was taught in the lesson, and there is no hope of them being open to discussion and my giving them the necessary partner feedback that every dancer must get.
On the other hand, sometimes I encounter someone who does not have this fear beaten in to them, and it is a joy to share my knowledge with them and watch them discover their capabilities. If teaching should do anything, it should foster this forever-learning cultivation of humility, not destroy it to teach one single subject quickly.
No matter how important the subject you wish to teach today, motivating anyone using the trauma of fear of failure or embarrassment or social exclusion is simply wrong, as it may work today, but it lessens the willingness for these people to learn anything new tomorrow. You have no right to use up that vulnerability all in one shot and forever remove someone’s ability to feel safe enough to be humble. Whatever one thing you are teaching, it is not that important.
© Justin Locke
