Learning by teaching

And why anti-perfectionism is an ongoing process

About 20 years ago, I taught in a conventional classroom in a private school near me. For the most part, I loved it. I loved my kids, I loved making a difference, and I loved having a high degree of autonomy to make decisions about how to help my kids learn the most they could while they were in my class.

Unsurprisingly, there were things I didn’t love, like giving grades and writing report cards (ours were narrative report cards, which were fine for the first few but got to be a drag pretty quickly, which was really not fair to the kids farther down the list). In my last two years, when I was doing my MFA at Goddard College, which used a progressive model that didn’t give grades—your adviser determined whether you had a successful semester, meaning that you met the goals you set at the beginning, or not, and that was that—it became really hard to convince myself that a letter grade, or worse, some percentage, actually meant something.

If I’d been teaching math, it would have been different. You can objectively get 76% of your math problems correct. It doesn’t work that way with writing. What the heck does a 76% mean as an essay grade, or even more, for the poem you wrote? Even with a rubric, what does that number really tell you? And what was that number, translated into a letter grade, going to do to a kid’s future once it landed on their transcript? Did it really deserve to have that much power?

And yet, JFK’s grades obviously didn’t hold him back. 🙄

If I’d still been teaching when I did my Kaizen-Muse Creativity Coaching training, I’d have been an even better teacher for it, but fitting into a conventional classroom would have been even harder, because KMCC is very non-linear and questions a lot of the “rules” people think they have to follow in order to reach a goal. People have often asked me why I never went back into the classroom after I left that job, aside from a semester as an adjunct professor at Drexel, and that’s a big part of the reason. I love the act of teaching, but grading, and other aspects of the conventional classroom (dress codes, for instance, which can be more subjective than they should be), just became harder and harder until they felt so arbitrary to me that I just couldn’t make myself try to fit there anymore.

Fortunately, it didn’t take me too long to discover that you don’t have to be in a classroom to teach. I taught several KMCC and SoulCollage®-based writing courses in the pre-Zoom days over phone conference lines, and had a great time. (And no report cards!)

Teaching this way is more comfortable for me because I’ve also never been big on the whole teacher-up-front-bossing-students-around model. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, and things certainly are changing for the better, but it’s still how a lot of classrooms work. When the library at my school got new furniture, I claimed the old tables and chairs for my classroom so we could sit in a big square and see each other, and be on a more equal footing. You were never going to find me pontificating from behind a lectern. The closest I got was when I’d illustrate a point on the whiteboard, often with stick figures (sometimes with exploding heads). I didn’t think people learned well when big power dynamics are involved, and I still don’t.

Like these. I’d say I don’t know which kid did it first, but I think I do, and I’m not naming names to protect the guilty. ‘Cause you learn better when you’re laughing. Drawn by yours truly.

If we’re being honest, teachers are just people, like everyone else. And the job is to help other people, not exercise power over them. Nobody ever passed a test by being scared to death of it. They may have been motivated to study harder, but that fear probably made it harder to get that studying to stick, because that’s how brains work when they’re scared (they don’t, in fact, work very well at all).

The big thing I’ve learned about teaching in more than 20 years, and in multiple environments, is that—if it’s done right—the teacher always learns at least as much from the students as the students learn from the teacher. The big myth about teaching is that the teacher is some all-powerful know-it-all who’s there to fill up these empty vessels with blessed words of knowledge. First of all, if it were that easy, everybody could just read a book and be done with education in a couple weeks. DONE. We wouldn’t have to have debates over learning styles or pedagogical theory or school board elections.

On top of that, teaching isn’t a one-way adventure. Students have questions—as well they should! Sometimes they don’t understand. Sometimes they notice things that someone should have noticed before, but either didn’t or didn’t have the nerve to ask about. Maybe they think we’ve had it all wrong and should look at the whole thing a completely different way. Sometimes they’re curious about something loosely related. Other times they’re totally misguided. But the one thing students absolutely never are is an empty vessel, and the idea that they are is just insulting. They deserve better, no matter what age they are.

These? Are not students. Just so we’re clear. Photo by Oshin Khandelwal on Unsplash

I learned more from my students in the eight years I taught at that school than I ever could have imagined I would. I learned about my international students’ home countries and cultures, sure, but I lalso earned about compassion and grief. I learned about how and when I wanted to use my power as a teacher, and how I most definitely did not (the cultural implications of a message home to mom and dad could be particularly harsh, for instance, and that power was only to be used in the most desperate situations). I learned a whole lot about myself, and what I was capable of as a teacher, a confidante, occasionally an accomplice, and just as a human being when another human being needed something, whether it was an ear, a helping hand, or an advocate.

Teaching and coaching have a lot in common. Sometimes I think they’re the same thing. In certain situations, they are. And a lot of the time, I find, there’s a weird alchemy where you’re simultaneously the coach, and the teacher…and the student. Because it turns out that the things you’re telling your student/client are the things you need to hear in the moment, too. And the things your student/client is saying are also things you need to hear. So there are “roles,” but everyone’s learning, because we all have wisdom to share in our own ways, and if we’re truly wise, we’re all listening for the wisdom from al directions all the time.

I find this a lot on the podcast, too. I’ll say something and even as I’m saying it, realize it’s something I need to hear, and my guest will say something that hits for me in that moment, too. Maybe the same thing has happened to you?

I’m in the final stages (at last!) of getting my Make Bad Art course ready to officially introduce to all of you, and the program will begin, for those who sign up, in about a month. While I’m putting a lot of thought into how it’s going to work, I’m also not lying to myself—I know this course is going to be a co-creation between me and my students, because students can’t help but bring a lot to it. Someone will tell a story that will blow us all away with its depth and the lessons we can take from it. Someone else will mention a book or movie or documentary that will add to the experience. Someone else will share a song or painting or joke that reminds us all to take ourselves more lightly. And I’m leaving room for all of that to happen as we go. In fact, I actively want input and feedback to make the program the best it can be.

It’s like the story of Stone Soup, where everyone brings their little bit to the pot, and each contribution makes it a little richer, a little sweeter, a little more valuable…and changes everyone involved in the co-creation a little more than they would have been changed otherwise.

The whole truly becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

It’s also true that we teach the things we most need to learn. I love that Make Bad Art abbreviates to MBA—and I’ve been thinking of it as the anti-MBA. I don’t think any of us is immune to the cultural pressures of perfectionism, especially in our Instagrammable society. Have y’all heard of this crazy “fridgescaping” trend?? I mean, seriously???

Make Bad Art is a course to help us all unlearn and unwind the forces that keep us bound up in perfectionism, caught up in the culture that tells us that, as adults, we have to stay stressed, be perfect, and conform to rules and identities that don’t fit us, all to please others and some nameless, faceless “them” that says so. When we do that, we lose touch with the inner wild, curious, creative kid who's always been inside us—the one who knows how to play, invent, have fun, let go and live with joy. To put it another way, it puts us back in beginner’s mind.

Make Bad Art is a playground for the liberation of your inner artist AND your authentic self, and the effects will trickle out into your life beyond the class container.

I’m not going to be decorating the inside of my fridge any time soon (where is the food supposed to go? And isn’t it annoying to have to fumble around all that other stuff?? I really don’t understand!), but I need reminders not to cave to this stuff just like everyone else, because we all swim in it every day.

I have even caught myself trying to be a perfectionist about how I’m putting an anti-perfectionist course together, which is the height of irony and has given me several good, head-smacking, eye-rolling laughs at myself.

In other words, I’m right here in the anti-perfectionist trenches with you, because it’s a recovery process. I’ve spent nearly 25 years working as an English teacher or a copyeditor/proofreader, where perfectionism is pretty much baked into the job description, making it a real challenge to live up to the requirements of the job and attempt to detox from those same requirements in my personal life. I know how tough and frustrating that is—it feels like Sisyphus rolling that boulder up the hill and then having to do it all over again the next day.

Even if your job doesn’t present that kind of challenge, I don’t think you ever really reach a destination, because the culture presents its own headwind—but it does get easier!

It can also be fun. Giving yourself permission to do things badly can be really weird at first, because it’s so counterintuitive, but it’s also just so incredibly freeing. There’s a sense of mischief—of getting away with something while the teacher, or Mom and Dad, isn’t looking.

Those stick figures of mine became a fun part of my class for all of us because I decided to go ahead and laugh at my crappy drawing “skills,” since I couldn’t really pretend they were anything else, and it gave my kids permission to be flawed and human, and to make mistakes as they learned, too.

You do not have to do anti-perfectionism perfectly, either! That may seem obvious, but if you have perfectionistic tendencies, it’s easy to think that things will only work if you do them absolutely right. Hands up if that sounds familiar! ✋ Don’t worry—nobody else can see us! All righty, I’ve counted us all now, so every last one of us can put our hands back down. 😉

Here are just a few of the things you lose when you loosen the grip perfectionism has on you (to varying degrees at varying times, as this is also part of the process):

• Judgment of yourself (which extends to others)

• An overworked negativity bias

• Difficulty generating new ideas, and the ones you do have are never good enough

• Fear that you are not good enough, and will never be good enough

• Fear of what other people think

And here are a few of the things you gain to replace them:

• Self-kindness (which extends to others)

• A more general sense of positivity and confidence

• More new ideas, and they’re more interesting to you

• Security in yourself, your worth, and the knowledge that you are—and always have been—good enough

• Your own self-validation outweighing anyone else’s disapproval

I don’t know about you, but I’d say that’s a pretty good swap. Even better when you get to have fun at the same time!

I’m teaching the course I need, because I know others need it, too, and that we’ll all bring something to the program as we create it together. But what I know more than anything is this: The more support we have over time in unlearning these destructive patriarchal, capitalistic patterns of permission- and validation-seeking perfectionism—and let’s be very clear here: they are incredibly destructive in often subtle, invisible ways—the better.

That’s why it’s best suited to a safe group environment where we’re reminded that we’re not in this alone, that we don’t need to do it perfectly (and we can have a good laugh when we catch ourselves trying to), and that we’re all allowed to give ourselves permission to be fully human, to embrace our authenticity, to loosen up into our wild, curious, delicious creativity that makes us feel alive right down to our toes… and to own our own integrity and validation, so that no one can take them from us.

I hope you’ll join us on this quest. You can find all the details about Make Bad Art here.

What would it mean to you to have less perfectionism in your life? How does it feel just to think about that possibility? Let us know in a comment!