I’m pretty sure I know just enough about “stuff” to be dangerous.  And when I say “stuff”, I mean everything.  My head is full of useless trivia, book learnin’ and decades of experience doing all kinds of things.  As I get older, people assume I know more “stuff”, just because I’m more “mature” or “experienced” – basically just nice ways to say older.  I like getting older.  I like when a student asks me a question in class and not only do I know the answer, I LIVED the answer.  Like the one day a kid challenged me and asked if I knew who AC/DC was.  ‘Nuff said.

But how do we KNOW things.  I have a student teacher right now and my job is to allow her to teach my classes with the knowledge and skills she currently has and pop in now and then to advise, correct and/or encourage.  I help her navigate the pitfalls of teaching, help her to be proactive, to be more aware of individuals.  Standard teaching stuff.  But how do I KNOW that what I’m doing is really helping her?  How do I know that I know what I’m talking about?

Well, we go back to the older, experienced thing.  I’ve known all kinds of people who have taught forever and never really seemed to know what they were doing.  Maybe it was just because I didn’t agree with what they were doing or understand what they were doing.  I’ve also seen drivers who have been driving forever who didn’t seem to know what they were doing either.  So, the argument that being older means you know more isn’t necessarily true.

Well, how about research data?  How much time have you got?  The more I learn about research, the more I see how it can be manipulated by someone who wants to prove a particular point of view.  Very seldom does it see we get results from research projects that say something like “wow – that’s not at all what I expected!”.  Researchers are trying to prove a hypothesis and depending on who participates, how many participate, when they participate, how questions are worded, how environments are manipulated, who’s paying for the project, etc., a researcher can make his or her research prove whatever they want, especially if they’re good at manipulating language.  How else do we get viable research that says global warming (or climate change) is real and other research results that claim global warming is NOT a real thing.  I’m not taking either side here, but both sides of the argument throw out research that supposedly proves their point, but how does either side really KNOW?

Then there’s experience.  Experience is so random.  My experience as a 58 year old teacher compared to another 58 year old teacher is going to be completely different because we are different people with different personalities and minds who have experienced different things in different places during that time period.  And how do you decide which person KNOWS something more than another?  Is it the number of degrees you possess?  Is it the people you have the opportunity to work with?  Is it the number of books you’ve read on a subject?  Is it the fact that you can speak in a convincingly knowledgeable manner? Again, the things you know are based on what others know and then, how do you really know that they know?

I found myself doubting myself this afternoon when my student teacher asked me a question about something I had suggested she do for a lesson.  She basically wanted me to justify the activity.  And for a moment I panicked.  How DO I know this works?  How do I know that this has a musical objective?  Why DO I do this activity?  And then I calmed down a bit and analyzed this activity that I had been doing for a while and I was able to justify it.  At least to my satisfaction.  But that’s the thing, isn’t it?  We all get to choose what we want to know and what we don’t want to know.  Since there are so many ways to know – whether it’s through experience, research data, higher education, intuition, knowing something is actually a pretty abstract concept.

Maybe it’s a combination of all of these things that brings a sense of knowing.   Maybe it’s stopping a moment to really think about something that affirms the knowing.  And maybe there’s no such thing as a universal definition of knowing because it’s as individual as one’s perception.  Regardless, tomorrow I’ll go back to school, to an institution of knowledge, and hope I know what I’m doing so I can help my student teacher to know what to do as a future teacher.