Working through the glitches

In the quiet darkness of the planetarium I may have heard some snoring, but I swear it wasn't me. I was breathing deeply and at times my eyes were shut, but I was just resting. Honest.

Well you can't blame a bunch of faculty members for falling asleep in the dark right after lunch on our big workshop day. Final grades were due at 9 a.m. and I know some profs were scrambling right up until the last minute, but enough of them showed up to make our morning workshop sessions worthwhile. We learned things, shared stories, and laughed together, which was good enough for me.

Which is why I was a little annoyed this morning when a colleague expressed sympathy over how badly the workshop turned out. How could we have been at the same event? Granted, we endured a few technical glitches--an intransigent computer, a clock stuck in a time warp, and a presenter delayed at a rail crossing. But while we waited for these problems to resolve, we filled the time by talking about great things our students had accomplished this semester.

If there was one unexpected throughline in the day's presentations, it was the need to accept and learn from imperfection. A presenter talked about what he'd learned from a new assignment that was "somewhat okay some of the time," and a small group discussion led to a great piece of advice for profs facing disruptions to teaching plans: "Accept imperfection." Another presenter reminded us that we need to acknowledge our students' right to fail: if they resist all our attempts to help them succeed, then "we may feel like we have failed them when they've failed us."

Our campus caterers didn't fail us: the lunch was perfect and the conversations even better. And then a bunch of us went over to the planetarium to see what the whizzy new equipment can do, except those comfy chairs in a darkened room were an invitation to relax perhaps a bit too deeply. 

We've all worked hard this semester and we needed some relaxation, and some laughter, and some commiseration, conversation, and compassion. I offer no apologies for presiding over a glitchy workshop. We're imperfect people working in imperfect circumstances and sometimes being somewhat okay can feel like triumph.