Becoming an Imperfectionist

   On June 17 in the United States, we celebrate Father’s Day, a day to recognize the special role that fathers hold in their families. Evan Smith, one of our fabulous IEW dads, wrote this post to relate an experience he recently shared with his son. Enjoy reading about Evan’s journey to becoming an â€Å"imperfectionist.†    Becoming an Imperfectionist â€Å"I am supposed to be grown up now, and I am profoundly ignorant about everything.† This realization, as reflected by Andrew Pudewa in However Imperfectly: Lessons Learned from Thirty Years of Teaching and Other Articles, is common for many parents and teachers at some point in the odyssey of educating their students. Andrew goes on to acknowledge that â€Å"maybe it’s not entirely my own fault,† but the consolation is minimal when one is in the thick of a conflict where the future well-being of a child is seemingly hanging in the balance! These quotations, pulled from Andrew’s first â€Å"lesson† in However Imperfectly, reveal how hard it is to not do to our students what was done to us. I was brought up in a traditional school setting with standards set for me that took no account of my individual learning needs and overall interests and goals. Thus, I graduated without much of a sense of accomplishment and without a real direction on how to proceed with the things that I wanted to do. I mostly learned that I should be keeping the status quo, and if I couldn’t produce perfection with an A+, then nothing was really good enough until I could. Despite being blessed with exposure to alternative education options for my own children (including IEW), I recognized the negative traits I had been imparting in my son when his assignment for Unit 9 rolled around toward the end of the school year, and the two of us had come to an impasse. Despite his talent for writing, my son had begun to struggle in accomplishing his weekly assignments. Over the course of a few conversations, it became clear that he had been feeling confined by the checklists and creatively stifled by the unit models. While he said that he actually liked many of the dress-ups, he found it quite taxing to figure out how to include all of them in every paragraph when he was already satisfied with how his work sounded. Ultimately he just wanted to tell his own stories, but had grown frustrated with having to include â€Å"so much† in his papers this year compared to the bare bones write-ups he had been able to churn out in years past before we began to work with IEW material. . Evan's greatest accomplishment was to marry his wife, Kathryn, and begin their family together in 2006. They reside in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, with their six children and one dog. Evan enjoys reading to his family, telling stories, singing, playing guitar, riding mountain bikes, and drinking coffee. Log in or register to post commentsEvan Smiths blog Log in or register to post comments