Family Room -- Fear Factor

One of my core philosophies is that you can never really teach anyone anything – they have to learn it for themselves. This may explain why my teaching career wasn’t a total success, of course, but I’m really thinking about parenting. My children are small now, but someday when they’re teenagers I hope they prove me wrong.

One of the lessons I hope I can communicate is not to let fear and anxiety get in the way of trying new things. I’m not talking about vegetables – in the case of most veggies, I think fear & anxiety is a reasonable reaction. Looking back over my life, though, I can see so many times when I missed out on something good because I was too afraid to try. Several examples:

• When I was in junior high, the choir director asked me to join the choir. I put it off till high school.
• Then she asked me to go out for the school musical. Not only was I too scared to get up on stage, but I also was afraid it would screw up my schoolwork. I finally went out in my junior year and made the chorus; by senior year, I was one of the leads.
• One time the school’s athletic director asked me to be the public address announcer for the football team. I said yes, but as the week went on I started to think, “It’ll be so hard to see what’s going on. What if I mess up?” I sought him out and told him I couldn’t make it, I had “stuff to do at home.”
• It's probably only fair to note that I never asked a girl on a date till I was 16 1/2.
• When I went to college, I joined the radio station -- which in itself was a huge leap of faith for a guy like me. It took me a year after that, though, to get involved with sports broadcasting, which had always been a passion of mine (All right, don't torture me, I'll confess – it still is. If some minor league baseball team called tomorrow, I’d quit my job in a heartbeat).

OK, no major harm done – just some things I would have enjoyed that I didn’t get to enjoy till later. Bummer enough, but consider this one:

I was in high school and college at the start of the personal computer era. My mom was walking through a mall one day and, on impulse, purchased the fabled TRS-80. She quickly decided she couldn’t really use it, so it came to me.

Actually, there wasn’t that much you could do at that point with a TRS-80, but I did everything I could and loved every minute of it. I even took computer programming courses. Then the time came to declare a major……

Keep in mind, computer science as a discipline was pretty new, at least for the general public. I thought about computer science, but I kept coming back to, “Computer science is for geniuses, I could never hack it” (pun unintended). So I majored in math, minored in secondary ed, and went into teaching.

Fast forward a dozen years or so and the teaching gig isn’t going quite like I drew it up on the chalkboard. I’m teaching part-time at all sorts of colleges, trying from semester to semester to piece together a schedule. I decide once again to start taking computer science courses….

… and before you know it, I end up in a programming job, having the time of my life. It wasn’t exactly instantaneous, but probably quicker than I had a right to expect. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of great things about teaching, but I still kind of feel like it took me a little extra time to get it right.

My son, who is 6, told me this week that he didn't want to go to college if he had to "sleep over" -- so I can see I have my work cut out for me. There are about 800 line items in the parental job description, but this one might be in the top 10: to give your kids the chance to face the world without running away.