confidence - humility = arrogance

I'm all about humility lately. Maybe because becoming a small business owner is very very humbling.

I never did get around to finish my philosophy discussion recap. and I've forgotten most of the details to make it meaningful anyway.

I do recall there being a lot of talk about confidence and how kids need to develop it. In the sudbury process not a lot will happen until kids are confident enough to try things. Public or traditional schooling can be confidence sapping because you are constantly being judged. I love when I go to elementary schools and you see all sorts of art projects on the walls and there is a ridiculous sameness to it. why does every snowman have to wear his hat? why can't some of them toss it into the air a la Mary Tyler Moore? I can remember what it was like as a kid to be told that my drawing or coloring was wrong. I remember my first grade teacher used to stamp our work satisfactory or excellent. there may have been a poor stamp too but I never got one. I craved an excellent stamp in the worst way but I would color outside of the lines or miss a spot or whatever, I just never got one. I finally worked my ass off to color a unicorn. I only used blue. I worked on it forever, especially the horn, the tricky narrow horn. When the papers came back I waited for my excellent stamp and was pissed when I only got a satisfactory. I don't actually remember being pissed but I must have been because I was upset enough to ask why I didn't get an excellent. She told me that it was because it was blue and horse are brown or black. I said "But it's a unicorn. It's imaginary!" I kind of wish I would come across her and tell her that I think she was an idiot.

My long winded point is that I still remember it 30 years later. That feeling of wrongness. And it was all about coloring. Really, the wrongness I should be feeling is about how the kids used to tease this kid Christopher because he had wet his pants through most of kindergarten but we were in first grade now and he had gotten it under control. That's what she should have been giving poor and excellent and satisfactory stamps about. right on our snotty little foreheads. Hmm, I've gotten off track here.

Confidence and encouragement are important but I think there has to be a certain amount of humility. It's fine to want to accomplish things on your own but at some point you need to be able to accept help, even if you don't want to. People who are sure that they know everything, that they don't need to listen or won't even entertain the possibility that their thinking might be flawed are arrogant. Arrogance is not only unattractive and off-putting, it can be dangerous. Arrogant people tend to be dismissive and poor listeners. I remember complaining about a creactive writing teacher who was an awful writer. We went to one of his plays and it was soooo bad. I wanted to drop the class and I certainly didn't want to listen to a thing he had to say but someone I knew and respected warned me off from this thinking. She said lack of talent doesn't mean lack of expertise.