Lessons learned while falling

Last spring, I was headed off to one of my freshman classes that I had been discouraged with.  They were fine talking with each other, but when it came to talking out in class, they just wouldn't do it.  "What was missing?" I asked myself, and the answer came very clearly; Trust.  You can read and write by yourself, and you can listen by yourself, but when you speak a new language in front of others, you need to trust the people you are making yourself vulnerable in a certain way, and placing your trust in the people you are speaking to. So how to start talking about trust, in a foreign language, in a way that would possibly be understood?

Hearkening back to my oh so many days as a camp counselor, and in church youth groups before that, I immediately thought of a trust fall.  A bit cheesy, perhaps, but essentially simple - one student stands on a table or desk and falls backwards into a group of eight or more other students.  As long as the person falling keeps their legs and back perfectly straight, it is totally safe and easy, as the weight of the person falling is distributed among so many people. Ah, if only I could get my students to do a trust fall... but no, I didn't think they'd go for that.  Not when saying an English sentence in front of twenty students was too difficult for them.

All that to say that thirty minutes later, I ended up standing on a desk counting slowly backwards from twenty with a panicking cluster of fifteen of my students behind me, all freaking out because they were quickly realizing that I was indeed going to fall backwards into them when I reached zero.  Which I did, and quite safely, too.  In fact, it worked so well (aside from a very elevated heart rate on my part) that I went on to do the same exercise in all my other classes last spring, and in all of the classes that I taught this fall as well.

So, after doing this a few times, and giving my students a chance to write about the experience a bit before discussing it with the class (giving my heart rate time to come back to normal), here are a few things that I learned from the experience:

• Trust is very surprising to people.
• There is often a big difference between perceived risk and actual risk. (In other words, we usually think a given activity is riskier than it actually is.)
• Making yourself purposefully vulnerable is a very powerful act.
• If you are going to embarrass yourself in public, do it memorably.
• It's necessary to continue to push boundaries - others' perhaps, but mainly your own.

As this new year is now coming in, it occurs to me that this year more than most will be a year of closing my eyes and falling, both backwards and forwards, for us, as we finish our teaching contract here and look for the next steps to take.  New situations, new jobs, new risks, and most of all new opportunities.  Here's wishing you all an exciting, risk-taking, challenging, safe, and happy 2012!