Try Something New

This weekend, I had the pleasure of watching my students perform in The Secret Garden.  While they all did a fantastic job, the amazing revelation was the 8th-grade girl playing Mary.  She embodied this character, projected, and engaged with the other actors like she had been on stage her whole life.  Here's the thing.  She just started doing theater last year.

What makes this remarkable is how rare it is to see kids pursue something brand new.  Most of the time, I see kids who have already decided they don't like things that they don't already do.  I'm not sure of the cause.  It would be easy to blame social media for increasing the chance of public embarrassment on a large scale, thus deterring them from wanting to do something they aren't already good at.  It would be easy to blame video games for the number of hours it sucks out of our lives.

While those are easy culprits to throw under the bus, I think it may have more to do with adults.  We tend to tell kids what to like and not like by what we do.  I have heard many parents tell kids that they don't like math easier and it's okay because they don't use algebra.  (STOP SAYING THAT!  YES, YOU DO!)  My school has had more than one chapel speaker who tries to get the kids on their side by telling the kids that they hate reading or history.  (Please, if you are ever invited to speak somewhere, don't go in and disrespect what they do there.)  We put kids into soccer when they are four and then tell them that they love soccer, even if they don't.  If a kid expresses an interest in art, we tell them that people don't make any money with it and discourage them from pursuing it in favor of STEM fields.  Don't get me wrong, as a science teacher, I'm thrilled that some of my students want to pursue science careers, but I would never try to dissuade them from pursuing an interest of any kind.

We have fallen into an interesting habit of telling kids they should follow their passion while simultaneously telling them what their passion should be or outright choosing it for them.  In doing so, we implicit;y send them the message that other things aren't worth their time, and they don't allow themselves to recognize that there may be passions they have not yet discovered.  Yet, there are many examples of people who accidentally find something they love just because they tried something new. 

A few years ago, I wrote about our Girls Varsity Basketball Team that was made up almost entirely of seniors who had excelled at other sports but never been basketball players.  Each one of them ended the season saying they would have done earlier if they had known they would love it so much.  I had no idea when I was a junior in high school that I would fall in love with physics during my senior year and want to make that my life's work.  If someone had allowed me to stay locked into only things I already knew about, I would not have found that.  Andrea Bocelli was a lawyer until he was 34 and then decided to pursue music.  Mary Kay was 45 when she decided to try her hand at business, and Vera Wang didn't open a bridal boutique until she was 41.  You don't know what you will like or hate until if you have given it an honest effort.

When you find yourself interested in something, don't talk yourself out of it.  Try it.  Take a class, learn from a youtube video, anything.  If you don't like it, you have wasted a bit of time and money, but you have still been enriched by having the experience.  If, as adults, we still have the potential to find new interests and develop new abilities, why would we ever discourage kids from trying something new?  Kids do not yet know whether they would like something if they tried it, so encourage them to try things.  Let them know that experiences are important, even if they don't end up making it their job or even taking it into their adult life.  I don't play the piano today, but I know I benefitted from the five years of lessons that I took (not to mention the clarinet I played in the school band for three years or the blast I had playing handbells at church).  There's more to the experience than the outcome.

Take a lesson today from my bright, happy 8th-grade student.  She decided to try something new, and she is very happy that she did.