I Know What I (Don’t) Know
A paraphrase of Paul Simon lyrics never hit more than they have in the last few years. Information has historically been a source of comfort for me. If I don’t know something, I can read about it, or ask someone who might, and assimilate (or more likely than not lately) forget this fact. Enter the Pandemic, where I would read late into the night until my eyeballs were dry in a scouring search for absolute truth with sky-high stakes and no clear path forward. Admitting what we didn’t know often had me mentally spinning, wondering and sometimes even asking out loud, “Where are the grown ups? Who is in charge here?”
Since then, I have watched people I love struggle with things I don’t personally experience, and I dance between sympathy-empathy; not in a graceful way, but more of a flatfooted fumbling stomp.
As someone with a degree and books to my name, whose primary occupation presumes that I know and can teach things, it can be challenging to admit I don’t know.
And yet the more time that passes, the more people and stories I encounter, I am continuously humbled by how much I can’t begin to know. I have layers of privilege and vulnerability, and I am not afraid to say that neither of these afford me the right to say I know what it is like to be anyone other than me.
Standing at the front of the class, I am The Teacher, but I am conscious that there are so many things my students know that I don’t. iGen is having a completely different experience with COVID as college students than I am. They are living in a fractured country with tensions boiling everywhere from the red-light to the inter-webs. A friend recently mused kids today have ’nothing to lose, and everything to lose and it’s all so large scale there's not much they can do about it’.
That’s heavy.
I am honored to be able to volunteer to guest post here on a student platform, and acknowledge that I am not the authority on what it is like to be trans at a small, faith-based college. A quote from Faye’s recent post on things she wish cis people knew about being trans (hyperlink to your post) struck me:
Basically, people use “they” to refer to me more frequently than they had before I socially transitioned. They =/= she/her simply put. I know part of it is I’m early into my transition ond part of it is general society, but it still feels shitty to hear this from friends when they are aware my pronouns are exclusively she/her. Feels like a reminder that it difficult to think of me as female.
This is the first time I have had a student transition during the course of the term and I want to be a source of support. I wasn't aware that it was not okay to use she/her/they interchangeably or to substitute ’they” as needed in a classroom. I thought of it as sort of similar to tu/vous in French, and that if I use “they” perhaps it is more appropriate in a formal, classroom setting.
I appreciate Faye pioneering and being willing to share her truth and I am grateful for the chance to learn how to be a better ally and a more informed teacher. Now I know.
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