Reaching The Unreachable Star

"I Saw A Man Pursuing The Horizon"

by Stephen Crane

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;

Round and round they sped.

I was disturbed at this;

I accosted the man.

“It is futile,” I said,

“You can never —”

“You lie,” he cried,

And ran on.

It's part of my philosophy in general that some fights are worth fighting even if you know they're unwinnable. This is true of life, the most important unwinnable fight of all -- after all, nobody gets out of life alive -- and it's true of many impossible things that are nonetheless worth trying to do. (As the admittedly somewhat cheugy proverb goes, "Shoot for the moon: even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.")

I'm still young and idealistic enough to believe that every student is in principle reachable, even if I'm far from expert enough to reach every student myself. The fact is that I don't know for sure which are the students I can reach and which are the students it would take a more expert teacher than I to reach, so I need to try my best to reach every student.

But even if that weren't the case, even if I knew for sure that some students are unreachable by me or anyone else and I knew exactly what students were the unreachable ones, I would still be inclined to try to reach them anyway.

“Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win” -- Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Of course, there is a tradeoff here -- every minute I spend trying to reach an unreachable student is a minute I'm not spending on students who are engaged and ready to learn. I fully recognize that at a certain point, it becomes necessary to cut your losses and concentrate your effort where it will help.

The Virtues of Not Knowing

In the The West Wing episode "Galileo", the President plans to do an event televised to schools nationwide centered around a Mars lander called Galileo V. The lander runs into trouble, disappearing from communication, probably destroyed, and most of the staff assumes the event should therefore be canceled. CJ, the Press Secretary, objects:

We have, at our disposal, a captive audience of schoolchildren. Some of them don't go to the blackboard and raise their hand 'cause they think they're gonna be wrong. I think you should say to these kids, 'you think you get it wrong sometimes, you should come down here and see how the big boys do it'. I think you should tell them you haven't given up hope, and that it may turn up, but in the meantime, you want NASA to put its best people in the room, and you want them to start building Galileo VI. Some of them will laugh, and most of them won't care, but for some, they might honestly see that it's about going to the blackboard and raising your hand.

As I have grown gradually more adult over my lifetime, I have grown more comfortable admitting "I don't know", increasingly cautious of ultracrepidarianism*. Some advisors have suggested I could stand to express more confidence about what I know, but others have agreed with me that it can be a powerful thing to say to students, "I don't know, but let's look it up together!" It's okay not to know; what's really important is wanting to know and the skill of finding out.

*Meaning "beyond the shoe", from a story from Pliny the Elder where the god Apollo paints a painting, and a shoemaker notices he's messed up painting a shoe, so the shoemaker points it out, and Apollo recognizes he did it wrong and repaints the shoe, so the shoemaker comes back the next day and is emboldened by his previous success to point out what he thinks is an error elsewhere in the painting, but that one is not actually an error, so Bad Things happen to the shoemaker because he just criticized a god on a non-error, leading to the admonition, "shoemaker, not beyond the shoe" -- do not opine on matters outside your expertise.