On being different

I am not like other people. Oh, not completely, of course; in fact, I have the firm belief that given any two people in the world, they’ll have something in common, though they may have to dig to find it. But all my life, I’ve perceived myself to be outside the mainstream, regardless of the nature of the mainstream I happen to be amidst at any given time.

For instance, consider personality typologies (such as Myers-Briggs). Generally, there’ll be a category that only some small percentage of people fall into–and I’ll be in that category. (In the case of Myers-Briggs, I forget the actual category, but I remember that the percentage is 3-4%.) Or, even more likely, borderline between that category and another small-percentage group. Happens every time.

The closest I ever came to being “typical” was when I went off to college in 1965; I went to a college where the majority had been “different” in high school, and so for the first time in my life I felt myself among the majority–as long as I stayed on campus. But even there, I found myself often in the minority in terms of ideas, opinions, ways of seeing the world.

I got used to it, of course, long ago. In fact, by the time I was a teenager, I took some pride in not being “typical”, not being a conformist. I eventually got over that too (mostly), and now am quite comfortable with just being who and what I am without defining myself in comparison to other people, or at least without worrying about it, most of the time.

The point I want to make is that there are advantages in being different, and knowing you are different from an early age. For instance, it was some protection against the excesses and worst idiocies of adolescence. I wasn’t totally immune to peer pressure–but certainly enough so that I didn’t fall into the worst traps. I had my own idiocies to deal with–but mostly didn’t get sucked into others’.

Another advantage is that I don’t expect people to be like me, so I’m not surprised when they aren’t. And it’s my perception that for a lot of people, this is not true; many people seem only able to project from their own experience and perception, and to assume that others feel or see things in pretty much the same way. When they then encounter someone who is clearly different from themselves in some way, it’s as though they don’t quite know how to handle it. Often they seem torn between denying the difference (“I know you really feel/think/don’t mean . . . “) and declaring the other person to be not quite human, even evil. Or perhaps they’ll be indignant (“How can you say. . .” or “How dare you. . .” or just “How can you possibly feel that way/think that?”) or try to convert the other person to their own perspective and be taken aback when the arguments that are so convincing to them simply wash off the other person without effect.

Or take the prospective teachers I work with. One of the hardest transitions into professionalism for some of them is to realize the children or young people they teach are not just themselves at a younger age. This matters both in terms of teaching content (“How can this child not understand this? It’s so obvious.”), and in terms of how to motivate their students and manage their behavior in the classroom (“I would have loved this when I was their age! What’s wrong with these kids?”) Took me about 30 seconds, on my first day of teaching, to figure this out. Of course the kids weren’t interested in what interested me, didn’t think like me. My own high school conemporaries hadn’t–why would these high schoolers? What had I been thinking? So I buckled down to figure out how they were thinking, and what would motivate them (and am still working on it, 35 years later. It’s the most fascinating aspect of teaching, to me; it makes teaching the same material over and over and over, year after year, continue to be interesting, as I am presented every year with new puzzles to figure out in the form of understanding my students’ thinking.)

In contrast, some of my current students–prospective teachers–seem to be unable to get out of their own heads and into their students’. They see what the kids do with some academic task, but can’t interpret it intelligibly, can’t get beyond “they get it” or “they don’t get it”. Or, worse, they begin to interpret students’ behavior pejoratively: “They don’t do their homework because they are lazy” perhaps, or “They just aren’t interested in learning!” Which is not to say that children, or especially teenagers, aren’t sometimes lazy or more interested in their social lives than learning academic material. But these interpretations are not helpful to a teacher; they do not help you improve your teaching or help you get through to your students. They only protect your self-image. Understanding students’ thinking and feeling is helpful–and oddly enough, being different–not being typical–can actually make it easier to learn to do that. One of my current ongoing puzzles is to figure out why this is so hard for these students, and how to help them learn to more truly see their own students. The good news is, these students constitute a small minority–most either come into our program already skilled at insightful interpretation of children’s thinking, or begin to learn it within weeks.

We are all different, often really different, from each other. Everyone, whether they like it or not, has to learn to live in a world in which there are many people very different from themselves. How we respond to this reality, individually and collectively, matters. So here’s to learning to understand and even appreciate differences–our own and others’.

(Some day I’ll post on being alike, but not today–it took forever for this one to get finished.)

PS I only realized after publishing that this makes two in a row about my own strangeness. This one’s been sitting in my unpublished post pile for about two months now; I don’t quite know what to make of the fact that when I surveyed the pile this morning, this was the one I picked to try to finish. I’m not feeling all that alienated, honest!

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