“Be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of someone else.” Judy Garland – Self-Efficacy

Transcript

Introduction: 0:00 

Hello, Steve and Dan Fouts here. We’re veteran educators from Illinois who’ve created the Teach Different podcasts to model how to have unforgettable conversations using a super simple three step method, and quotes from some of the world’s great thinkers. This method works with students of all ages and all types of classrooms, and can be used in online or face-to-face environments. So, if you’re a teacher, administrator, social emotional learning specialist, or anybody who loves the art of conversations, you’ve come to the right place. Welcome.  

Dan Fouts: 0:38 

Well, welcome everybody to this week’s episode of the Teach Different podcast. We’re very excited this week, as we are in all weeks, of course. We have a brand new quote, and this time not a philosopher, or a civil rights leader, or some sort of famous historical figure, but American actress Judy Garland is joining us tonight with a wonderful quote about self-efficacy. We’re going to get to that in a moment. Our two guests, Elizabeth Burgos and Mary Ellen Wessels, are joining us and I’m going to let them introduce themselves once we begin our conversation. For those of you unfamiliar, we’re going to take Judy Garland’s quote and break it down. First we’ll look at the claim of the quote, and then we’ll move to the counterclaim of the quote, another way of looking at her words of wisdom. In between all of that, we like to give different ideas for curriculum connections, and how we think our kids would process a quote like this. The whole point of these podcasts is to inspire all of our listeners to try these conversations in class with their own students. That’s kind of the endgame there. With that, let’s begin with Judy Garland. We know her from “A Star is Born” and of course as Dorothy in the “Wizard of Oz.” She died tragically of a drug overdose at age 47.  While she had a very short life, it was a very consequential one. Here’s her quote on self-efficacy, “Be a first rate version of yourself instead of a second rate version of someone else.”  Let’s begin with what our guests think the claim is.  What is Judy Garland saying here? 

Elizabeth Burgos: 2:56 – Claim

I can begin, if that works. I think this quote is saying, be yourself because that is enough. You don’t need to try to be anyone else because if you do, you won’t do it as well. I think in order to be yourself, you need to know yourself, and that sometimes takes a lifetime. Along the way, I think paying  attention to what you do, how you achieve things, and how you feel when you do certain things, helps you to know yourself.  I would call this life lessons. Stress, for example. Do you handle it best by physical exercise or by being creative?  By dancing and writing or playing or listening to music? And how do you handle the unknown or new challenges? And have you had experiences in those areas that have informed you? I guess that’s what I would say. I also wonder about that word self-efficacy, and how this relates to the quote, because for me self-efficacy is having the self-confidence to know how to solve problems and navigate tough situations. I guess I’ll let someone else talk a little bit about what they think. 

Dan Fouts: 4:30 

That was great Liz, if you could just give a little background of where you come from and what you teach, that would be great. 

Elizabeth Burgos: 4:38 

Okay, I’m sorry I forgot to do that in the beginning. I am a resource teacher for gifted students at Washington Liberty High School in Arlington, Virginia. I am an  instructional coach and the IB CAS coordinator. I work with teachers and  students and promote the use of creative and critical thinking strategies within content areas.

Dan Fouts: 5:09 

Welcome. That’s a great way to start this. Does anybody else want to build on what Elizabeth said or offer another perspective? 

Mary Ellen Wessels: 5:19 

I’m sure I can weigh in a little. I’m Mary Ellen Wessels, I teach sixth through eighth grade humanities at a nonprofit Public Charter School with an arts integration mission. That’s what my background is in, arts integration education.  What Elizabeth shared is definitely part of what I was thinking.  I kind of thought of the quote as saying you’ll be more successful and happy if you’re true to yourself and play to your strengths and who you are, rather than try to imitate someone else, even if they’re a role model.  I teach middle school students and developmentally, this is the time when they’re figuring out who they are.  At my small school, a lot of the students come from places where they felt like outsiders because they are kind of creative. Sometimes they felt bullied. So I think this quote could be really inspiring to them. It reminded me of a Maya Angelou quote that I really like, “if you’re always trying to be normal, you’ll never know how amazing you can be.” So I thought that was a similar quote. And lastly, I was just going to say sometimes I teach stagefright workshops, and one of the things I often say is when you go on stage you always have some kind of a  persona. In my case, I just try to be myself. 

Steve Fouts: 6:54 

Do you think that the students, and it’ll probably depend on the ages, fear being themselves? Some of them at least, or are they comfortable being themselves? How do your students perceive the idea of being an individual, putting themselves out there, not trying to be like anybody else, but being themselves? How are they going to react to that?  

Mary Ellen Wessels: 7:33

Well, I’ll jump in real quick. I think that a lot of them, especially the middle schoolers that I work with, kind of want to be themselves, but they also really want to fit in.  I think that while they do kind of want to be themselves, they recognize that they also want to be part of the tribe, as it were.  They’re trying to figure out a way that they can be themselves, but also be part of the group. 

Elizabeth Burgos: 8:10 

Yeah, I would agree with what Mary Ellen is saying here about students. You know, a lot of students kind of walk a tightrope between being individuals and wanting to step out, as well as fitting in.

Mary Ellen Wessels: 8:39

I was thinking that too, and that it leads into the counterclaim really well. For me, the counterclaim that I was thinking of is that it’s really important to have role models, people that we look up to and admire, and that we use this kind of inspiration for patterns of how to create ourselves.  I think that when we’re really little we learn by imitating the people around us, right, like our parents. I think that’s true all through life in some ways. The trick is trying to be inspired by people and look up to them without trying to be them. As a voice teacher and musician I connect with this because you learn a lot, or at least I learned a lot, by just trying to sound like the people whose voices you like on the radio. But, you also want to not literally be them. You’re trying to develop your own unique style as well. The quote also made me think a lot about how right now, with so much instant celebrity status and fame being so fleeting, I wonder how much younger people have taken the time to really be selective about who they’re patterning themselves after.

Dan Fouts: 10:35 

Just thinking to themselves, I’m going to pattern myself after the person on  Instagram who has the most followers. I’m not thinking about it much. I’m just going to pattern myself based on someone I don’t even know, who might not even be a legitimate role model to me. There’s not a lot of discrimination. In terms of not discriminating between who should be a role model and who shouldn’t. Yeah, I agree. 

Mary Ellen Wessels: 11:06 

Yeah, when my sons were younger they used to watch some of the gamer YouTubers who were really popular. One of them was Jack Septic Eye. I used to always  joke that I could never play him for my students, because he swears a lot. But actually, I think he’s a really good role model in a lot of ways. He’s very open about his struggles in life, he has a very positive mental attitude, and he really tries to encourage people to be accepting of themselves and each other. Anyway, there’s just a lot about him that I actually think makes him a very good role model in some ways for kids. It’s interesting to sort of think about who do people, especially my students, admire? And what is it that they admire about that person?  Looking back historically, when we were looking at teaching art history and things like that. I was thinking about how “The Greatest Showman” was this really popular musical and I hadn’t seen it. Then, I listened to a podcast about PT Barnum, and thought I’m not sure I really want to see it. It’s interesting. You’re always finding out more about people that you admire, and then you think, maybe there are things I admire about them, but then there are also things that I might not want to model. 

Steve Fouts: 12:41 

Right, but the idea of a role model may create a second rate version of someone else that might be better than a first rate version of yourself at certain points in your life. It’s a tough question. I don’t know, Dan, what’s your sense?  You work with high school students.  So did I. I worked with high school students on the west side of Chicago, and I’m trying to think of how they would approach a quote like this. I guess my thought is, it would depend on who they are. If you’re more of an artistic type, you’ll take to a quote like this. But, Mary Ellen you bring up a great point with music. When I was learning guitar, I didn’t want to come up with my own song when I started learning. I wanted to pick the songs I already liked and I wanted to imitate them. That’s what motivated me to learn an instrument, things that I already heard. I wasn’t thinking that I was cheapening myself or not really being myself, the true musician. I thought of it as, let me get used to this, and I got somebody to look up to. I never got good enough to develop that first  rate version of myself with it. I feel like writing was an area where I imitated writers, but then developed my own voice. I’m just kind of sharing my thoughts on this. I think that students are going to react differently to it.  

Dan Fouts: 14:45 

Yeah, I agree. Every student is going to look at this differently. I think in high school there are similar challenges to middle school, Mary Ellen, where you do have a lot of students who are not yet comfortable in their own skin.  Many don’t even see their talents and abilities. I think this is where the power of teachers is most evident, when we are able to pinpoint certain things about students that they might not have realized themselves. They need us teachers to point out these things so that they can understand themselves enough to consider themselves a first rate version. They need that feedback. One thing I do, this is a good little tip for teachers, is pick out one thing that a student does, let’s say they wrote an amazing paragraph on a project or something, or they did something that was exceptional. Send them an individualized email explaining exactly what they did and why it was something incredibly unique that you’ve never seen before. You know, a little communication like that builds this idea that there’s no one in the world like them. They get that message. So anyway, there are little things we can do to help students realize that they can be a first rate version of themselves. Back to the claim. 

Mary Ellen Wessels: 16:35 

Yeah, I really like to do that too, and I often make sure I cc a parent if I think the kid will be okay with it. I feel like as a parent, and as a teacher, it’s so easy to just contact parents with bad information, like bad news or concerns, so I really like to be able to say, “hey, this is amazing, you did such a great job on this, or you really thought about this.” 

I did have a curriculum idea with this that I thought was really cool, and now I really want to do it. If you’re studying identity, I thought what if you had students do an art project where they take a famous person they admire and they create some kind of self portrait of themselves, like a sketch, a painting, a photo, and then they overlay it with a transparency that has the image of the famous person and use identity poetry combined with the overlay so that as they lift up the famous person you see the identity poetry in their own self portrait. I thought that would be a cool way to sort of connect that. 

Steve Fouts: 17:48 

That makes me think that if you pick a role model or an idol carefully, and it’s well thought through, it starts to blur the difference, in my mind. Trying to be like someone you respect says a lot about you, and really does define who you are.  Maybe that is your best self. It’s not just a human being that you’re looking up to or trying to emulate, it’s a human being’s thoughts, it’s their actions, it’s their virtues. That can be a reflection of you, as well. 

Mary Ellen Wessels: 18:37 

Yeah, and I will also say that the one other slightly pesky thought I had about the quote, the idea of a first rate version of yourself versus a secondary version of someone else, is that it’s competitive. If you’re modeling yourself after someone else, it doesn’t have to be better or worse. 

Dan Fouts: 19:11 

As long as it doesn’t become this obsession, where you lose sense of your identity, then there’s nothing wrong with embracing somebody else’s accomplishments and wanting to be like them. I have another curriculum connection for any kind of history course. You could have this 30 minute conversation to get the kids exploring the idea of being themselves first, as opposed to maybe being a second rate version of someone else, then as you discuss the claim and the counterclaim and you talk about role modeling, you can have the kids decide upon a historical figure that they most admire. Why do they admire them? 

You know a couple of conversations ago, we had a quote on heroes, “Who is your hero.”  I think that you can learn a lot about kids by whom they identify as their hero. This might be a decent conversation to have right at the beginning of the year, before you do a lot of history where they learn different figures in history, and have the kids connect with them throughout. Maybe an end of the year project. 

Elizabeth Burgos: 20:42 

This applies to social emotional learning. I was thinking about this professor, Jorge Valenzuela. I think he’s an engineering professor at the University of Old Dominion. He’s an educator and instructional coach who started integrating social emotional learning check-ins, and uses something that he calls emotional planners, which I feel is very similar to the conversation starters. He’s doing this in a field where there’s not a lot of ethics being taught, like in a computer science class for example, and that’s sort of a criticism. But, he’s bringing in questions like how are we feeling? How do we feel about what we’re working on? Are we doing  any harm with what we’re working on? Those kinds of questions, I think, are really important. 

Dan Fouts: 22:07 

What you said, Liz, reminds me that we’re right here. I think we don’t want to send a message that other people aren’t important. We want to be a first rate version of ourselves, but we don’t want to be isolated, and so much of an individual that we don’t look at other people as sources of inspiration for our own self development. I think this conversation would be interesting in class. Helping the kids understand the importance of this kind of thinking with the counterclaim and claim together. What do you learn from other people? Can you be a first rate version of yourself without learning from others? I don’t know if anyone can do that. There’s an inner dependence that we have on other people that I think might be revealed through this conversation in a really powerful way. 

Elizabeth Burgos: 23:16 

Yeah, I agree with that. No man is an island.

Mary Ellen Wessels: 23:26 

Exactly. You want to be a first rate version of yourself, and a first rate contributor to the tapestry that is humanity. So you’re a part of this big picture, as well as being your unique self. 

Steve Fouts: 23:46

If I can add this. I was thinking of some students where I taught who aren’t doing well with themselves. All students are like that, all people. We’re not always on our A game. Sometimes we need support. We lose ourselves at times. When you have students who are lost, whatever you want to think of that as, metaphorical or they’re just not right. There’s something going on in their life, they’re experiencing trauma, or everything is unstable. Being yourself to those students doesn’t grip them in the same way as it grips other students, and sometimes they need someone else to pick them up, to tell them they’re okay, and that’s okay. It’s almost necessary in some environments. 

Mary Ellen Wessels: 25:10 

Yeah, that is definitely something I was thinking about too. It made me think of the conversation about windows and mirrors. I think that for students I’ve had who are really dysphoric, like students who are cutting and in a lot of pain, it’s important to say that whoever you are at this moment in your life, that’s you and that’s an important part of who you are. It’s not who you’ll always be, and it’s okay to be whoever you are right now. You don’t have to be an amazing Judy Garland first rate self, you can be who you are right now. That’s important, I think.

Dan Fouts: 26:04 

Interestingly, I read a little bit of Judy Garland in preparation for this recording, and she struggled with substance abuse. Many of her directors were very critical of her appearance and her acting. If you look at this quote, it reveals something real about what she might have been experiencing, which makes it so authentic.

Mary Ellen Wessels: 26:34 

And, women in general back in that time period, plus being in Hollywood, I mean wow, those are two strong battles to fight.

Elizabeth Burgos: 26:47 

Yeah, she must have been a very powerful woman to have to endure some of what you mentioned. When you mention the word trauma, she lived through a lot of trauma and had to keep going. You know you mentioned her addiction, and she starved herself, or people told her to starve herself.  It sounded pretty harsh the life she lived, yet what she created, what she did. I was thinking about the Wizard of Oz and how iconic that movie and those songs have been. And I was telling my students today, I told them about this quote, we talked about it for a while. My husband, he’s an immigrant from El Salvador, when he started his English studies at our local community college, the text the teacher used was the Wizard of Oz. He would come home and tell me what they talked about. You know, “Somewhere over the rainbow,” I mean, that was a song that I sang. Our elementary school put on that musical and everybody was in it. We had so much fun with it. It was such a huge piece of our culture. You ask people, have you seen that movie, and almost all people say yes. Her contribution was substantial, and she obviously suffered a lot for it.

Dan Fouts: 29:10 – Essential Question

That’s true with a lot of celebrities. They achieve great fame, and have to endure suffering along the way. Well, what a really nice conversation. We went in a lot of different directions, but I felt we gave good balance to the claim and the counterclaim, and gave what I hope is a picture of what this might look like if you use this in class with your own students. 

Using the Teach Different method, you post the quote, you work with the claim, you have the kids push against the claim with the counterclaim, and then we like to end with an essential question. I have one that relates to role models, which is something that we discussed a little bit on this call. Here’s an essential question that you might take from this, “Are role models healthy for us?”  

Postscript: 30:11 

Thanks everybody. We hope you’re walking away feeling energized by some great  ideas and are confident that conversations like this are possible. It only takes a little bit of planning and a three step routine. Make sure you go to our Conversation Library to learn more and try out some conversations we have ready for you. Don’t forget to Teach Different with conversations and make a difference every day.