Fueled by Doubt

As teachers, we often try to inspire our students with positive encouragement. We shine a bright light on the possibilities found in new beginnings and on each student’s potential for growth and learning. But for some students, their fear of failure and overwhelming sense of doubt may be so powerful that they cannot hear our cheers. Doubt may come from home, from messages perpetrated through the media, from the neighborhood, from peers or from school. In some cases, it is we teachers who unwittingly sow the seeds of doubt, perhaps in our efforts to set realistic expectations or to soften looming disappointments. Often, the students most affected by doubt are the ones already uncertain, vulnerable and relegated to learning on the outskirts of the mainstream.

Decades ago, I was one of these students.

As a child, I used to hang around after school every day. My immigrant parents were busy people and often not at home. Some teachers would allow me to linger in their rooms, and if they had time, they would chat with me. One day after school, I was in my language arts classroom poking through a box of vocabulary words printed on flashcards. The words were captivating to me, and my teacher noticed my interest. While she seemed thoughtful and well intentioned, this teacher managed to flood my world with doubt using fewer than two spoken sentences. She told me that, in her experience, children of first-generation immigrants like me who spoke a different language at home would likely never be able to use English words as well as children whose parents spoke English at home. Perhaps, she suggested, it would take another generation after me before our Chinese-American family would have a skillful writer or an eloquent speaker of English.

These words rang in my ears for weeks. The doubt confused and worried me, and it finally made me really mad. Before long, I was making my own flashcards at home, poring over stacks of books with big words from the public library, and writing letters to random people just to practice putting my thoughts on paper in English.

Several years ago, I heard an interview between first lady Michelle Obama and a teenager. The young woman, who was graduating from a local high school, had been granted this interview at the White House because she was the first person in her family who would attend college that fall, just as Obama was the first person in her family to go to college. This high school senior asked Obama for advice as she began this daunting journey. The first lady was sincere and serious as she responded: “There will always be doubters in our lives. Sometimes, we ourselves are the greatest doubters of all. What you need to do is to use the doubt as fuel to power your life forward.”

Doubt, fuel, power, forward. I had never considered these words together, and their potential to inspire touched me deeply. Doubt is something we try to ignore, suppress or push away. But can doubt serve as the fuel to propel us toward our goals? Looking back on my own childhood doubt, I realize why Obama’s wise advice resonated with me so poignantly. Doubt indeed was what powered me to march past a dusty box of vocabulary flashcards and forge beyond diminished expectations. I became an avid reader, a fluent writer, a confident public speaker and a lifelong teacher.

The first time I told this story was as the keynote speaker at the eighth-grade graduation ceremony of the K-8 school where I taught. In its telling, I wanted to honor and validate the doubts of soon-to-be high schoolers, as well as my own, as I prepared to retire from 28 years of classroom teaching that same year. In doing so, I hoped that a young athlete cut from a sports team might be inspired to write poetry, a student admonished for doodling in math class might dare to show the art teacher her sketchbook, or perhaps a small, first-generation Chinese-American girl might set her sights to one day play for the WNBA. I hoped that I would find new ways to teach and learn.

For some of us, acknowledging the doubt and doubters in our lives takes a lot more courage than naming our hopes and dreams. Making and taking up space for these doubt-as-fuel stories in schools, classrooms and conversations can shine a bright light on the realities found in new beginnings and on each person’s potential for growth and learning.

Hsu is a recently retired third-grade teacher who lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.