Leaning into Funny

Being good enough is serious stuff

When I was 15 or 16 my sister announced to everyone at the dinner table that I was funny. Her words stayed with me and supported my long career in public education. From essay writing to King Lear, no matter what material I was teaching, I had confidence that I could work a room of 17-year-olds with wit! Having recently moved on from teaching in that capacity, I have embarked on a new career journey as both a university professor of Education and a creative. Now I get to work with my hilarious sister on our podcast, script writing, grant writing, and book authoring. For most of these projects we “lean into funny” (Rebecca’s words)! But in all of these creative ventures what remains deadly serious to me is the deep desire to know that I am good at what I do. How do I measure ability and skill, the quality of my work, when the measurement tools I used for 20 years are no longer valid? Since leaving the board I no longer have the laugh track of my high school English students to tune into for gut checks and quality control. And because teaching adults offers a very different kind of feedback I feel like I’m swimming in new waters, working towards finding my footing.

Andragogy, or the method and practice of teaching adult learners, is the lens through which I am supposed to see my Master of Education students. A key principle for this style of teaching is honouring life experience in the learner. An adult student has years of living beyond the classroom under their belt and brings those experiences with them to the educational table. In theory it should be a feast! But I’m finding that it takes a lot of cajoling on my part to get these students to see inherent value in what they bring to the class. They are deadly serious about school and humourless about how learning is presented. It’s as if they lose their sense of self when they adopt the mantle of “student.” It is especially challenging when we don’t see each other in person for the challenge of creating community when separated by computer screens is real for both student and teacher. For a number of them the focus of their learning is not on what they offer others (and me!) in the classroom, but is limited to some anticipated and tangible takeaway. It’s as if they believe that only after they write this paper or craft that presentation will they finally be good enough to call them selves learned.

The truth is that I have much to learn from my students about myself. Like them I can forget to honour the experiences that brought me to this moment - twenty years with teenagers DOES in fact provide me with many tools to teach adults and write. Having been shaped by life’s hurts and hurdles I have valuable things to offer that someone else can sit with and mull over, even grow through my sharing. Who I was informs what I am doing now even though my past and present look and feel different. How my future might be shaped by all of this learning is not clear, but maybe if I lean into funny the humour will help me to take myself a little less seriously and create a positive and sustaining feedback loop. The confidence I want my adult students to feel in their own sense of being good enough might even be something I can claim for myself.