Way over my head
I’ve always believed that one of the most important skills that individuals need to acquire is the ability to discern those areas in which he or she has knowledge or skill as well as those areas in which his or her knowledge or skill is as vacuous as a black hole.
While I am certainly no expert, I consider myself at least able to hold a reasonably deep conversation about baseball, mathematics, education, or music.
However, last night I was reminded yet again of one of those giant empty areas of my life whilst surrounded (I must say; “whilst” is a cool word) by dozens of individuals who clearly knew what was going on.
A good friend of mine from Mosaic invited me and several other of her friends to a wine tasting dinner in Covina. The evening started off simply enough with a host pouring everyone in attendance (about 35 people or so) a taste of some unknown wine. As I sipped, the only adjective that ran through my head was “white”. After that brief sip, I turned my head to see everyone else engaged in some form of swirling, or sniffing, or conversing about some mysterious quality inherent that was clearly being missed by me. So getting my cues from those around me, I swirled (how long? 2 seconds? 30????), I sniffed (”smells like wine, if you ask me), I sipped. Again, nothing stunning. It was at this point that it finally hit me that having zero training on what exactly it was that I should be smelling/tasting would make the rest of the evening rather interesting. Yes, I’d seen the film Sideways, but that was offering little in the way of help.
Perhaps most bewildering was about halfway through the dinner (which was amazing), the host got up and starting talking about the different wines we had tasted. Throughout this he used adjectives that had previously relegated to the realms of personal fitness, or at best, carpentry. What bewildered me was at one point he asked us to smell a particular red wine (I knew it was red by looking at it) and call out what flavors we smelled. “APPLE”, “CHERRY”, “CARAMEL”, “CINNAMON”, “PEAR”, were just the beginnings of the seemingly random flavors that these eisegetes were proclaiming. Like I said before, it just smelled like wine to me.
As I looked around, part of me felt like a student sitting in a rocket science class, with all of my classmates sitting around, smiling, engaged, clearly with a clue what was going on. And it makes me wonder, is this what it’s like for some of my kids sitting in my algebra class? Do I make my curriculum accessible? Are those who are lost left simply to find their own way looking around in bewilderment as the rest of the class calculates slope?
Regardless of my geeky connection of wine tasting to algebra classes, I did have a wonderful time, which goes to show that as long as you enjoy the people you hang out with, pretty much any activity can be worthwhile!
Filed under: Uncategorized
