Some years ago, I got the chance to be co-leader on a student trip to Benin. My colleague, an anthropologist, was the one really in charge. My sole qualification was that I spoke decent French. But the trip needed a woman co-leader, I had traveled in the developing world before, and I didn’t have pressing commitments at home. On the small faculty of the college where I taught at the time, those attributes narrowed the field to two candidates, and I won the coin toss. I joined the trip as a sort of camp counselor, and settled into the one-credit, pretravel prep course to learn something about the country we’d be visiting.
As part of our preparation, we had to memorize a few sentences of Fon, one of the major local languages in Benin. We learned to say “a fon ganji a!” (good morning; literally, “did you wake well”), “aa, n fon ganji” (a polite response; “yes, I woke well”), and “wa ndunu” (“come and eat”; a polite thing to say if you are eating, even to strangers passing your house whom you have no serious intention of feeding). After a few weeks of practice, my anthropologist colleague gave us a quiz, which the students uniformly flunked. Afterward, in the talking-to he gave them, he attempted to shame them into doing better: “Even Dr. Trousdale did better than you!”
Even Dr. Trousdale. The joke rankled for a moment. But I had to admit, it did seem odd: They were much younger than I was, still with relatively plastic brains for language acquisition. What’s more, they were taking the class for college credit, whereas I was there mostly for kicks. They should have done better than me.
Except that I had an advantage. I had never studied a language from the Gbe group before, but in addition to French, which I’d learned young, I had taken college-level courses on Latin, Italian, and Russian. I’d learned enough Swahili to be useful once or twice on a family trip to Tanzania. I didn’t know Fon or any related language, but I did know a lot about grammatical structures and had acquired a range of techniques for how to study languages, a skill set almost none of the students had.
That experience always reminds me of something that informs my teaching to this day: How I learn has changed since I was a student. As a researcher, writer, and teacher, I think of myself as always learning, but most of the time I am learning things for which I already have an intellectual framework — a prebuilt shelving system.
Exploring new subfields or deepening my expertise in my research areas are things I do to be a more knowledgeable teacher, but that’s not the same as a better one. For me, one of the most important ways to improve as a teacher in the college classroom is to learn to do things that I’m bad at.
I was reminded of that lesson yet again this past spring when I was on sabbatical reading ecocritical theory — a new area of interest for me. I was learning new lines of argument and terminology, figuring out who the major figures are, identifying ongoing conversations and points of disagreement. But while I didn’t go into that project knowing what the arguments and conversations would be, I did know they would be there. Back when I was an undergraduate, I was just starting to understand that dozens of critical conversations run in parallel, with threads connecting one network to another. It’s obvious now. It’s a language I speak.
But exercising those familiar intellectual muscles doesn’t actually help me to be a better teacher in the college classroom, more patient, more empathetic, more effective. What does: the things I learn from way outside my wheelhouse, because they remind me of the real hurdles to learning — not just assimilating new information, but figuring out what information in a new field is most important, which skills are most helpful, and how the different pieces relate to each other.
I’m a verbal person, comfortable in the realm of words. The physical world is another story. I mix up left and right a lot. I have never played a sport. I like making objects, but I am not good at it, which explains why the hardest project I’ve tried on this sabbatical isn’t learning about ecocriticism or wrangling the contributors to the collection of essays I’m editing. It’s been learning to sew.
So far I’ve made myself two dresses. If you only account for the materials I bought — about $40 of fabric and thread — this is the cheapest way to get new clothes. If you count my time, even at minimum wage, it’s been outrageously expensive.
Learning to decode the symbols on the patterns, to measure extra fabric to create seam allowances, to hold the loose thread ends when I start stitching so the needle doesn’t unthread itself — all of it has been unfamiliar ground. And I have made some laughable mistakes, sewing closed armholes and attaching the right side of the fabric of one piece to the wrong side of another.
In sewing, I’ve had to literally learn new ways of moving my hands, using physical gestures that I am not sure are the best or most efficient for the purpose. Two or three sewing projects from now, I know I’ll discover not just that I set my first zipper badly (that’s self-evident), but that there’s a much better, generally accepted way to do it. Eventually I’ll learn better ways to thread the machine needle or align the fabric pieces.
This is what my students feel every semester. Like me, they have to:
- Learn unfamiliar meanings to words they thought they recognized (like, say, realizing that “interfacing” is not just computer jargon).
- Figure out how to break a project down into manageable steps, and not just the much-bigger steps their instructions suggest.
- Determine where they really need to understand the instructions, and where they can get away with guessing.
- Accept a certain amount of error as the price of getting started.
No matter how much I remind myself, as a teacher, that my students are still learning how to learn, that message sinks in far more effectively when I am trying to acquire a difficult new skill myself. That experience — with its attendant frustrations, satisfying successes, and embarrassing failures — reminds me of things I need to do, and do better, in the classroom. Things like providing scaffolding for students to help them identify the right next problem to solve, and to see the possibilities once they’ve solved it.
My first new dress was basically a sack, and the fabric I chose turned out to be too busy. If anyone needs a tent in a William Morris lily print, let me know. Otherwise I’ll probably wear it on hot summer days at home, when I don’t expect anyone but my long-suffering family to see me.
The second dress came out better: a little askew, with some odd accidental pleats at the arm openings, but it’s the right size and the streaky purple cloth doesn’t try to mug you.
Next time, I’ll work on getting the details right — I’m now confident enough to try adjusting the pattern’s measurements for a better fit, and I think I can do a better job finishing the edges. I’ve started to get a sense of the big picture, how to cut out the building blocks of a garment and make them hold together, and in the process, I’ve gotten an outline of just how much I have to learn.
If I keep up with this — in the same way that I ask my students to keep up with their work in a composition course — I’ll be able to turn out some nice garments one of these days. In the meantime, though, I’ll start to make the more-advanced mistakes, the ones that happen when you try to refine your skills or experiment with what you’ve been taught.
In the fall, I plan to return to the classroom wearing my new purple dress. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough, and it’s a reminder of how the learning process works, and of the core of what I’m trying to teach my students.
What I hope to show them with the wonky arms on my dress is that we are not here just to learn new information. We have to comprehend new gestures, frameworks, and habits of mind, discovering a whole world of problems, solutions, and standards. The only way to do that is to accept that we’re going to be frustrated and confused and make mistakes along the way. The goal isn’t a perfect garment on the first try; it’s assimilating the new skills, a little at a time, until we’re fluent and we’ve forgotten what was so hard to begin with.
