Confusion.

I

There's so much to be confused about when learning something entirely new. Educators can often forget that many of the things that we simply GET are being put in front of students for the very first time. And seeing something for the very first time is mental conflict. It is war. 

Always. 

If it's something not in your experience then your brain rejects it at first. That's the "I can't believe this is real" reaction. Remember the FIRST time you saw a video of police using excessive force on someone as someone who had never had a problem with cops? Maybe it was Rodney King, maybe it was George Floyd, maybe it was footage of the Civil Rights movement; black and white footage that says, "Look at how they USED to treat black people!" But the first time you saw it, after never having experienced it, you likely rejected it. "Why are they doing that!" your brain desperate for a reason. "Well, he was on drugs and dangerous." "Well he had just robbed a store and was assaulting them" "Well he had just used a counterfeit 20 dollar bill and was resisting" "Well they were where they weren't supposed to be." You search and search for an experience in your life to say, "This is why this unheard of thing is happening." 

You're uncomfortable, aren't you? In that moment? Your brain weighing it's years of experience against the contradictory event unfolding in front of you. We are hard wired to fight that new info. New information changes the way our world operates, and the brain operates on stability. So rather than accept the new info and organize it to fit into the world, we reject it. We find reasons to reject it. We find ANY REASON WE CAN to reject that which we don't agree with. Evolutionary speaking, it's kept humans around for 12,000 years. 

"It's the way it's always been done." and so we keep doing it. If lighting a fire every night keeps the tigers away, you're gonna light the fire every night. But when the warring village across the plain can find you at night for violence, and the call comes to extinguish the fire, people will worry about tigers. Anything that ensures our success becomes necessary for the success to happen. Look at superstition in baseball. The stinky socks or the pre game ritual doesn't have magical powers, it just tells the brain "Don't worry, all is as it should be," so it can focus on other things. 

All this is to say it's normal. Normal to be resistant to change. However, discomfort, confusion, rejection, those are when we're weaker. Our guard is down a bit at first. And that's a moment for growth. All Growth hurts. Physical growth can literally hurt. Emotional growth often comes after a cry, or a spout of anger, when we have a clearer view of the pain. When that happens, we can grow. Pain can be just another bloody moment or it can be the last bloody moment. It's up to you. 


II

So what does this have to do with coding? OR poetry? Or teaching? How is he gonna connect this. 

You already know don't you?

With Brandon yesterday I felt confused almost the whole time. I didn't tell him, but I thought about quitting once or twice, just saying, "I know some HTML now and really, learning this super complicated stuff is not for me. I"m just not as good at this." 

I can't tell you how often I've done exactly that. I've looked at my life and seen myself stop when things get hard. When I get confused. Not a lot during school confused me. I all just automatically made sense, enough sense to get As, Bs, and the occasional C. So I never struggled. I didn't struggle academically until college. And that struggle almost ended me. When I finally hit a wall, I would just give up. And so that's how I almost failed out of UF. On drumline, when I couldn't play, I would just stop. I STILL can't play the flamjam section of Small Grooves because I stopped working on it. I would rather play the part I already know over and over again, than constantly fail at something and slowly slowly slowly get better. IT's been a defining factor of much of my life. When it gets hard I stop. 

So this time, I'm fighting myself. I'm fighting the "You can't do this" and arguing with my brain who is saying "Everything is so comfy now. Look at all the time you have for playing video games, for reading, for watching Hulu and Netflix and Disney+ and for doing some yard work and sitting and staying the same. Stay the same. Don't change." My Brain is scared. IT knows there is so much discomfort ahead. So much rearranging of long connected neurons. I am having to fight myself now to make time for the thing I can do. Even now, typing this isn't coding. I'm avoiding it because I can writ e a blog post real well, but going and finding out why my code is giving me an error when it looks exactly like it should? That's a headache. But once I hit "post" on this, I'm heading for the headache. 

I guess a cool way to end this would be to just end without anything clever, post this first draft of a blog post and just go code. 

That would be cool.