To improve my teaching, every year I try to take a class unfamiliar enough that I am back at “beginner’s mind” and experience the frustrations of being a new learner. I want to capture how my students probably feel when they start the units that I teach, and observe what works and what does not for me as a learner.

One year I did an entire term learning how to draw wings with pastels. I have made felt hats, gone on yoga retreats with no previous experience, become a Zumba instructor, tried mountain biking and sketched nudes at my local hotel’s weekly life drawing night. I tried my hand at an art retreat in Bali, with no previous experience in acrylics or watercolour.

I attended the Digital Humanities Summer School last year and deliberately sat in on the coding classes rather than ontologies and Linked Open Data – where I would have been far more comfortable. This year I learned to kayak.

I need to be reminded how it feels when grasping concepts for the first time and integrating this into existing knowledge. Part of my challenge is to not take it all so very personally. I am used to knowing what I know, and being competent, and then suddenly I am faced with something I am not good at – in fact have no idea how to do it at all.

It takes me quite a while to stop beating myself up as incompetent, rather than just … learning. I KNOW how to tie my shoelaces, keep chickens and cite using APA6 style, so WHY when I try to work out how to read in a file using Python can I simply not do it?? I feel cross and frustrated, but really need to get a grip and understand that if I already knew it, there would be no need for me to be sitting in the class. All is as it should be. Feeling incompetent is exactly where I should be.

It may mean that my job as a university teacher is as much about creating an environment for confidence and small successes in my students, normalising transitory confusion and frustration and a feeling of not knowing what is going on… as it is about providing useful course material and assessments. I try to keep that in mind with my teaching style.