Up: [[Personal Essay and Memoir]] Related: [[Thinking]] Created: 2024-05-16 There was a time when I was going to write a book about the importance of challenge to learning. I was passionate about my topic, convinced this was going to be the defining book of my teaching career. I was going to give everyone advice on how to find the exactly right degree of challenge that would let them spend more time in Csikszentmihalyi’s flow. Then I went to a literacy conference where, to my horror, there was a mandatory session on mathematical literacy. Yes, word problems. To be more precise, a single word problem that we worked on in small table groups for an excruciating forty-five minutes. I don’t remember the problem, except that it had to do with lemonade. I’d like to claim that I don’t remember it because it happened many years ago, but the truth is I couldn’t have told you the problem ten minutes into the session. While my table mates dug in with unseemly glee, I checked out. I pretended to look interested, murmured the occasional “Uh huh” and “that looks right” and journaled my disdain for this “stupid, ridiculous, who cares” exercise. I know how to develop new knowledge by linking something I don’t understand to something that I do. I take pleasure in wrestling a difficult concept to the ground. And yet there are entire areas of human knowledge where I literally do not have a clue. I’m not talking about things I don’t understand because I have no interest in them. I want to understand astrology. I want to understand the basics of physics. I’d like at least a nodding acquaintance with simple geometry if only so I can learn how to draw a street scene in perspective. But all of these topics elude me. What’s going on? Carol Dweck would say that I have a fixed mindset about these topics; that I think I won’t understand them so I don’t even try. Howard Gardner would tell me I have low spatial intelligence (true), then pat me on the head and reassure me that I’m smart in other ways. A psychologist would attribute my difficulties to my all-or-nothing complex, meaning if I can’t master it and be brilliant at it, I won’t play. All valid reasons, and every one of them a nail in the coffin of my aborted book about challenge. But what is unexpected and absolutely wonderful about this stage of my life is the unseemly glee I feel about my ignorance. Shame and frustration have been replaced by a sense of marvelling in the freedom of this intellectual free fall without a net. I don’t get it, haven’t got a clue, and that is finally, thankfully, perfectly okay. (450 words) Earlier freewrite is called [[I Don’t Get It]]