I.

I was reading David Epstein’s new book about constraints, Inside the Box, and making tons of notes about next year when it was time for my two-year-old to begin potty training.

Parents know where this is going, but whether you are a parent or not, we all agree two-year-olds are humans, even if not fully formed, and an apt opening analogy for what you are about to read.

Here’s the rub: Turns out that many toddlers don’t want to potty train despite wanting to do everything else an adult or older person does. This is an obvious statement, but it’s one of those things in life that bear the witnessing.

My son will poach my food if it’s different than his own or demand that he put his own shoes on despite not really understanding the physics of it yet. His way of asserting his individuality right now is a saying that makes me wince for what it actually means versus what he believes it means: “Me first!”

After the first day of potty training, my son cried and said one word, “Diaper!”

This was a surprise/not surprise moment. He had been living like an indulgently gross emperor his entire life—expunging his waste as he pleased and when he pleased, uninterrupted, only to have us change his diapers and clean him with no consequences—when we thrust him into the serfdom of the modern-day toilet.

It was also not surprising in the sense that I myself remember a similar reticence to use the toilet and had already submitted myself to a déjà-vu-like forecast of how this would all go down.

This itself was an odd realization. How could I remember potty training? Was I eight, my sister three, when my parents decided I needed to make the next leap in my growth?

I don’t remember all of it, but I remember that my mother went to the store with me to pick out toys that she would display, in their boxes, on the back of the downstairs toilet. There they waited for me, ownership contingent on me doing my business below them. Except a week would go by, and I would lose interest in those toys.

I don’t know how I made my lack of interest known, but we went through several cycles of this. I still remember a toy I kept from this experience: a green robot with three eyes, red clamps for hands and red oven hoods for feet.

One day, driving down a hilly road, my mother and I were talking about potty training. All I remember of this conversation are the hills, the feeling of them as we swooped up and down, my view of them through the windshield, hampered by the back of my mother’s head, and my mother saying, “When you go to pre-school, you will be the only kid wearing diapers. You don’t want that, do you?”

“I don’t care,” I said.

And that was true. Diapers were more important than being socially ostracized. Though I knew that I was in for it. I worried. But I didn’t change.

And then my mom’s parents visited. I knew my grandfather was of a certain type when he saw me getting a slice of American cheese out of the fridge and lectured me on the falseness of said cheese, opening up a plastic-wrapped block of cheese that they had brought with them (no idea why) and making me eat that instead. The cheese tasted of unfulfilled expectations.

And then he found out I was yet potty trained. He got a fly swatter out, which made sense, because like a fly, I was a nuisance, and then he directed me to the bathroom. There my grandfather stood by the door, not moving until I used the toilet. It worked. My grandfather scared the, well, you know this joke.

What’s the deal with potty training then?

I don’t remember learning to walk, but when my son learned to walk, it was the opposite experience. He didn’t throw a temper tantrum and commit only to crawling; nor did we confront him, “Okay, we walk now!” He just went for it. He watched us, and he pushed himself a little further every day.

So, we have two types of learning and skill acquisitions: one that seems difficult but compelling on its own and the other seemingly easy but a right good problem of convenience and newness. We don’t need to really analyze the two to get at my point: battling with changing even the simplest preconceived notions of the world can be stressful, anxiety-inducing, and just plain difficult, even if the bit of knowledge itself is quite simple.

Acquiring a walking skill opens up tremendous freedom whilst going to the bathroom on a toilet hinders one’s freedom. Perhaps when we perceive something as “taken away,” we don’t like it. Our conscious minds the hoarders of both the physical and mental.

But the comparison holds an obvious observation about humans: when something is not immediately beneficial to us, we balk, especially when it disrupts our sense of freedom.

II.

Our job as teachers, in part, is to make learning very available and accessible. But to do that, we need to also make learning with the right amount of friction. Learning itself is not easy. It can be joyous, yes, but by its nature it involves change to one’s self while also forcing a reconsidering of the world outside one’s self. Maybe even a real hardcore reckoning that you, a seemingly smart human being, has had it wrong all this time you’ve been breathing.

And like exercising, really pushing yourself to go past your pre-conceived notions and biases is difficult without the driving force of another human, like a personal trainer getting you to go past what you would do alone. We are a species that seeks comfort but also information, and it’s easy for us in a modern age to do both of those things very lightly. The goal is always “lifelong learning,” but that is such a tall order.

I came into the English teaching profession to evolve it with all the parameters of glorious idealism pre-professionals possess. And though I have done so in my own way, the aspirations I had coming into the profession were akin to scientists going back in time to inject dinosaurs with meteor-impact-resistant genetics.

While it is true that many people are inspired by really awesome teachers and come into the profession wishing to do their own version of awesome teaching, some of us come here because we think the system needs a refresh. This was me. And it wasn’t on account of me having bad teachers. I have always seen the improvements that we humans need to make in our society rather than the beauty of the improvements that we are living through. Punk rock was my culture, and its first tenants are rejection of the status quo. This is a boon and a fault. It’s a young person’s mindset—a mindset for someone who feels they are looking at the world from the outside and when they finally get in it, they will have their impact. All this without knowing how truly complex things are.

When we are yet initiates, we chomp at the bit or bay at the seemingly unnecessary rules that pigeonhole us into some sort of structural method: the worksheet with the fill-in-the-blanks, the essay with the strict word count, the tricky prompt on that assessment, and that classical book that is surely leagues away from you in your own life but has meaning far beyond what you gave it when you opened it.

When I started to love learning, I didn’t realize it was learning that I loved. It wasn’t something school-related. It was political in nature. My teenage years occurred while living overseas, where America was more of an object to be studied rather than something I lived and could feel. It’s easier to criticize something at arm’s length, and so that was my first love of learning.

I read books, but most of them weren’t books from school. I was enthralled with life—I would count the minutes on the clock for school to end and that life to begin.

When I realized teaching was going to be my thing, this was my template (ironic, that). I had sublimated all of my learnings to something akin to an autodidact that had thrived on the boundaries of a rigid system. All I needed to do was loosen that system for others, and I would have it. Which, even though this early version of myself would detest the comparison, was very Dead Poets Society.

But it was more school that reinvigorated my career eight years into it, when it was beginning to feel stagnant. I got my graduate degree through the Ohio Writing Project, and the “pushes” I got there made me realize I could go to college all of my life if I had the money.

In my classroom, pushes can come from feedback and the like, but we forget how the parameters themselves push, for good and for ill. It’s easy to dismiss TEDTalks as uncool nowadays, but I really love “Embrace the Shake” by Phil Hansen.

I also love haikus. Especially this one by Shuson Kato:

I kill an ant

and realize my three children

have been watching.

It is utterly amazing that such meaning can be presented by an artist eliminating the chance for more meaning. It is a testament to how constraints can open things up for the artist and also the audience.

III.

In the past few post-pandemic years, we teachers have worried a lot about the anxieties of our students. It is true: teenagers have a lot of anxieties. Some stem from their busy schedules, others stem from their internal changes in progress, and others from what to make of the future.

Though, as Lisa Damour points out in The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, having anxiety is a mark of a normal human. When we “[have] the right feelings at the right time and [are] able to manage those feelings effectively,” we grow.

Most seasoned adults find their lives overly full by simply saying “yes” to tons of things, whether consequential or not, but mostly non-consequential. For whatever reasons, we find our lives filling with obligation upon obligation. Even the amount of entertainment we stream and passively consume can itself feel like obligations. But instead of worshiping the modern gods of efficiency to fix the problems of too-muchness, making more room for stuff that will, sure, increase our breadth but not our depth, we need to be more like haikuists.

That’s where my mind is going as I finish David Epstein’s Inside the Box—embrace more constraints. Maybe that will get me away from all this talk about using AI to help me grade my students’ papers or getting my students to get off their phones in class. Those things are so easy to worry about, but worrying about them doesn’t add meaning. It only expands the worries, which, as Damour points out, is a normal part of being a human.

Yes, there are a lot of holes to be poked into those last two sentences. But when I think about the one word that I want me students to embrace, “challenge,” I remember how difficult it is when I assign a piece of writing for my students to even come up with an idea to write about. I never would have ever thought that part of my curriculum would be about finding ideas, but there you are.

And there is a romance to that, an explorer’s luminance of the dark reaches of a wilderness. I want to keep that mentality, but I also want to have my students see the beauty of a highly constrained poem about ants and realize it’s stark depth. That it can be a poem both about how much control parents really have in raising their kids and the contradictions of human morality.

Most importantly, I need to embrace the fact that this will be a hard sell. Sometimes learning can be like learning to walk, reaching for that realm of the explorer, but a lot of important and essential learning comes from the discomfort of a constraint. One my son will hopefully learn soon enough.