daily prompt: truth – most can’t take it

Tell us about the harshest, most difficult to hear — but accurate — criticism you’e ever gotten. Does it still apply?

I have to admit, when I first read today’s daily prompt as I was scrolling through all the blog posts I missed today while on the road traveling for a project, I more than giggled. I LOL’d. Because the very first thing that came to mind was a review that I had with the head of my department at a community college I used to teach at. This was my first review as an educator (part time adjunct, but still…it counts) and it was based on commentary from my students. For those of you that know me personally you know that I have a close, personal and almost sadistic relationship with criticism. I LOVE criticism. In college I CRAVED it, NEEDED it…but I’ve written about all of this before. The bottom line is, if your peers are not criticizing your work, both negatively and positively, then your work needs work because you’re not raising any eyebrows….at all. That’s bad.

But, back to the story. So, I’m sitting down waiting to hear about how my students feel about my teaching, while she trudges through the basics – grades, attendance, outcomes, blah blah blah. Finally, she flips through a couple sheets of paper in this stapled STACK that represents my faculty evaluation and gets to the good stuff.

The first few bits are nice. Mostly to do with my knowledge of the profession and Autocad (I taught beginner, intermediate and advanced Autocad courses as well as hand drafting for almost 3 years) and that the content was always good, clear, mostly concise, blah blah. This was good to hear. Then she got to the next section. 🙂

It seems my students, almost unanimously (a total of about 40 between 2 classes at the time), described me as arrogant and that I sometimes rushed through the material leaving them feeling a little lost. I actually smiled and let out a little laugh at this. And let me tell you why.

They were 100% right.

I’ve been described as arrogant on more than one occasion by friends, peers, that strange fellow I talked to at the bar that time….It’s more or less just who I am. But I don’t see this as a bad thing. Arrogance is simply an unfriendly way of telling someone they are confident in themselves, self-aware and self-assured. These are good qualities in a person. Arrogance is taking these qualities to an extreme to where you aren’t humble enough to realize that others around you may have something to offer. This is certainly not me, though I will admit I may have seemed that way then.

I certainly don’t begrudge my students for feeling this way. I was full of bravado in my youth and have tempered some since then. I’ve learned that it is often times better to listen, consider, evaluate and then speak. I’m certainly no less confident in myself or my abilities and I’m always improving. But as I’ve moved through my 30s I have learned that there is more to being good at what you do than to just be right.