Humility

The prompt for this blog was "when was the last time you were wrong"... to be perfectly honest, I am wrong a lot of the time. When you have three brothers, your life work is to, genially, one up each other. At times this means you have a competition of strength or athleticism, which I always lost, and in fact never seriously competed in. More often than not however, my family is engaged in a never ending game of trivial pursuit, an off-the-cuff, stump-the-chump, knowledge bowl. Keep in mind that in my family I would be competing against a PhD, an oncology research nurse, a physics/chemistry teacher who has a talent for numbers, a history/religion/political science major who can remember nearly every date/event he has ever studied, a musical genius who has a large vocabulary and a talent for fixing things. In addition, my friends were nearly all in the top 10% of the our class academically, and many of them participated in varsity sports and the highest caliber music programs our school had to offer. I am not a stranger to being wrong.

For me however, the difficulty is NOT admitting when I am wrong, it is learning to deal with unintentional embarrassment. I do not mind being embarrassed as long as it is on my own terms. I can do ridiculous things, like sing or dance or yawp in pubic, I can wear strange clothing and do stupid things as long as it is on my terms. If I walk into a situation knowing that I will make a fool out of my self I am usually ok with it. However, when I am trying to make a point, or prove that I know what I am talking about, and I make a mistake, then I feel like I am three inches tall. I will need to work on that if I am going to be an effective teacher.