Give me the salt..

When asked what I do to maintain a sweet attitude toward my position at the college, I think of bread.  It has a natural rise and fall to it, it is massaged, it NEEDS the leavening ideally the tang of sourdough, but what it really needs is a reasonable dose of SALT.  Without the salt, it just isn’t the same.  Sweet needs some sour – I recently was binge watching a show called the Best British Bakery and even under the critical eye of one of the judges and renowned sweet cake maker, Mich Turner – she tended to favor those brownies and sweet treats that had a hint of bitter in the chocolate vs. the very sweet chocolate.  So, the point is that it needs to have flavor.  It can’t be all one thing vs. another – the balance needs to be present.  

As an instructor, I am interested in helping students find a sweet easy transition to learning but without working, giving them room to experiment and adding their own flair, that learning can be left flat and uninteresting. My husband once led a horse/personal training workshop in which the horses were the medium to better understand personal self-growth.  I was along for the ride, watching the scene unfold in the northern area in Tucson on a small horse ranch.  The clients were all middle-aged women looking for some inspiration and creating a nourishing and collaborative group setting to encourage self-reflection and draw attention to the present moment.  Nothing like a horse to tell you if you welcome on their back or to reveal your fears and nervous tension.  In that workshop it was all so mellow, but the women were really not allowing the horses to show a different side of themselves – a more masculine side such as being asked to run faster, to take more risks.  It was so very nice.  My husband keyed into this and encouraged the women to draw on that strength of the horse – that they could push them further and get greater results - and unraveling some of those shadowy sides of ourselves in a safe environment. He showed them some exercises to do with the horses, and it elevated the level of the workshop and their growth in themselves in which they were able to be more innovative and creative, rather than play it safe. In turn, through being more risky more vulnerable with the horse,  they gained greater confidence – again with a balance of the sweet and savory. 

I think that’s what students need too – In my online classes at YC, I know that I could simply ask students to read text, practice vocabulary and do various listening exercises in learning Spanish.  What they don’t want to do is to showcase their speaking skills in front of their peers in a new language – it’s very vulnerable.  Yet, it is what they need – they need to practice, push their boundaries and be ‘ok’ with not being perfect.  This week was the week of the mid term speaking test.  They got online with me and other peers at a designated time, had to speak on specific topics and I pushed their knowledge by asking more questions than those presented on the script.  Some were willing to be vulnerable – others were reluctant, but had to reach deeper – it was a test.  I want to have them keep pushing forward and trust that it is ok to keep expanding.  Being willing to fall down in a safe environment gives you an edge and to have others witness it can be seen as a strength.  It can give our class a way to help the students understand that they can struggle and that they are not alone in that learning, in that struggle to express oneself in another language where they want to sound like a native Spanish speaker.  As life-long learners wanting to push our skill sets, we have to keep going for finding the innovative, edgy limits and know when too much is too much.  But, we strive for something that is slightly out of our grasp.  That is what I hope to encourage when students work with me on these speaking tasks that might be slightly out of their comfort zone.  I know that if they didn’t do that and were in the midst of a conversation with a Spanish speaker in ‘real life’, had they not had moments to to express, explain or elaborate and have that expansion, their efforts in class would not yield to a greater conversation with others.   We as a society are told to be ‘strong’ but to be a strong student we have to reach deeper and have the difficult moments of vulnerability show through. Same for teaching.  I want to encourage those students to reach further - we are not finished products – I love it when students try to say things that they unsure of, but are open to saying more vs. staying in the safe comfort of a single perfect sentence, but it’s too bland.  Those who reach further will benefit from being vulnerable, experimenting and in the end having richer conversations and exchanges.