Kathryn Schulz: On Being Wrong

I recently watched a video of a TED Talk by Kathryn Schulz (it’s posted above). Most of what she said resonated with me because there are times in my life when I didn’t want to admit that I was wrong. A recent example of this is when I told my mom that I was going to a friend’s birthday dinner and where it was, and she told me I was taking the longer way to get there. I then decided to take an alternate route to get there and she said I was also going to take the train in the longer direction. I didn’t want to acknowledge that she was right after I looked at the map and navigated my way to the restaurant.

As mentioned in the video and illustrated with my anecdote, we live in a culture where failure isn’t tolerated.  Individuals who make mistakes are seen as failures or they are humiliated, embarrassed, or teased. That got me to thinking about my time at U of T thus far. Why on earth did I decide to go to university? Originally, believe it or not, the main reason why I wanted to attend university was to learn more about subjects I didn’t know about and to expand my mind. I do admit that it was also a way to delay adulthood when it came to working full-time. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t experienced adulthood in different ways during the time I’ve spent here so far (e.g. paying bills, finding a summer job, sending and responding to correspondence in a formal manner). Yes, I wanted more information on how to prepare myself for the working world, but it wasn’t at the forefront of my mind.  I had these thoughts in my mind when I was a high school student desperate to leave the highly structured environment. Once I was admitted to U of T, all of this changed. I still remember my first month here. I was still in a state of disbelief and shock that I was admitted to a top university and was now in a completely different world. However, the honeymoon ended and reality came crashing down on me as my first midterm deadlines approached.

When participation during class became an important part of my final grades, which was after I completed my first year, I started to become more insecure. I am a very talkative person and yet I’m not one of those people who likes to impress someone by pretending to know everything about a subject; I just want to share my point of view. In some of my classes, I was told by professors that my opinion was the wrong answer or not what they were looking for (sometimes it’s true and sometimes it’s not as I’m pursuing a double major in English and Sociology). I didn’t let my professors’ attitudes get me down but recently it has affected the amount of confidence I have in my responses. I still participate in class discussion (as participation is a large chunk of my final grade in all of my classes) but I noticed that I have been more reserved in recent years.

I also noticed fellow classmates who constantly spoke in a way to affirm their opinions and manipulate their arguments in such a way that the professor would give them favour (if they weren’t asking an open ended question). I’m not saying that the students in my classes weren’t intelligent; I just thought that sometimes their answers were inauthentic and every word that comes out of their mouth is a way to prevent them from feeling like they were wrong. Most people don’t speak up when it comes to close ended questions out of fear that they’d look stupid. I have begun to develop a line of thinking that I have to be right about everything and even if I have done my research at all, don’t speak.  This way of thinking has lead to me believe that I have to impress everyone all the time. I had to have all of the right extra-curricular activities (even though I am interested in them) and earning job credentials. I kept thinking about the future and the past but not the present. I became stressed all the time and it became a larger problem and I became unhappy and started losing interest in school altogether. I am getting help when it comes to planning for school but I still felt this way for most of last semester. As I am in my third year, I battle these thoughts as graduation approaches. Now I realize that I shouldn’t be afraid to make mistakes and that I’m human. I am slowly learning how to stop putting more pressure on myself because let’s face it, the world’s harshest critic is yourself.

It’s only through making mistakes that we are able to learn. Life is a process, not a fixed path, and we need to be more open about this and creating a culture that allows us to show our flaws and not allow egotism to flourish. As Kathryn Schulz mentioned, if we continue to allow ourselves to ignore others when we are wrong, it can lead to larger problems in the future if our world and business leaders have this mindset. As Thomas A. Edison once said in an interview, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” This doesn’t mean that you don’t try your hardest or to be a low achiever, just keep pick yourself off of the ground and keep going but don’t let other people’s comments eat you alive.

 “I err therefore I am human.” – St. Augustine

Now if only I can learn to continue to practice my advice on a daily basis…

The University of Toronto Drama Festival is an annual competition of student-written and -directed plays at Hart House Theatre. This year, blogUT is pleased to provide reviews and critiques of each show for your elucidation and entertainment.

The second night offered more in the way of humorous tragedies, but the first two shows were plenty more dark than light. The last, a farce, couldn’t change the overall tone of the evening, which was less tragic than the first but more neurotic; the demons of this evening’s shows were mostly internal.

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I’m sitting in the Tim Horton’s at Bloor and Devonshire actively moping into my hot chocolate. I’m joined by two friends, equally mopish. We return, once again, to the topic of that night’s activities:

“I don’t think they should have won.”
“She was terrible.”
“Yeah.”
“Really awful.”

We were referring to the recent adjudication of the University of Toronto’s annual Drama Festival, a four-night series of original one-act plays by UofT undergraduate students. My friends, playwrights and contestants, were bummed by their loss, but still at least a little giddy from the thrill of the competition.

“It was an honour just to have participated” says one, only half sarcastically.

We continue to talk, well into the night, about every show, every actor, every weird plot twist and too-long soliloquy. We talk until we’ve griped about everything we can, and only then does the giddiness of the whole experience pervade through the bitterness:

“And that cast was amazing.”
“Unbelievable.”
“So convincing, and for someone so young.”
“I know.”

And then the excitement of the whole experience comes crashing down and we start all over again, going through each show and actor and plot twist and soliloquy and reliving the delight of seeing our friends and peers up on stage, performing their own words for the first time in front of an audience. The historic Hart House Theatre stage, where Donald Sutherland and Lorne Michaels began their illustrious careers, and where a fresh crop of actors, directors, and playwrights do as well every year with their entries to the Festival.

The Hart House Drama Festival is a nexus of so many rare and wonderful opportunities. It’s a debut performance for a daring young actor, an audience eager for the first words of a new playwright,  a presentation of prizes and honours for the best artists and useful critiques for the others. It’s also a friendly competition between too-often antagonistic colleges. And, of course, a treat for the audience.

blogUT will be pleased to present you with daily reviews of all the entries into the Drama Festival, but there’s no substitute for seeing the shows in person!

University of Toronto Drama Festival

U of T is full of unique opportunities. They’re the bread and butter of this blog and my life; there are few things I like more than learning about a hidden spot or quirky club or meaningful volunteer position on campus. I scour the blogs and papers as often as I can, holding up event listings to my mental calendar and wondering if I can fit in a play, philosophy discussion, and homework in one afternoon. (I can.)

That’s why I was surprised and a little embarrassed to realize that U of T has had an entire faculty of performers right underneath my nose (and Museum Station) this whole time. The Faculty of Music is full to the brim of brilliant composers and performers, and features them in free shows at least once a week. Couple in the fact that a sudden epiphany (read: episode of Frasier) made me realize how much culture is missing from my life, and suddenly I’m cruising the Faculty of Music website for upcoming events.

In the past two days alone, I’ve seen the finals of a concerto competition (that bassoonist nailed it), listened to new pop pieces by students with classical backgrounds, and [I'm not sure what the verb is] an experimental theatrical music… thing in honour of the 10th anniversary of the passing of its composer. The last two events were part of the Faculty’s New Music Festival, which runs until the 27th and features nine more free shows. I’ll go to as many as I can.

“Shatnerian” is not a mainstay of the critical dramatic lexicon, but it appears exactly four times in the notes I took while watching SMCSU’s student production of Stephen Sondheim’s  Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. It was the robotic gestures and melodramatic, segmented speech patterns of the leading man and some of the chorus that spurred those comments, but next to them in my notepad are “amazing voice”, “spooky”, and “hilarious”.

To those unfamiliar with Sondheim’s masterpiece, the combination of spooky and hilarious may be alarming; to everyone else it’s ideal. Told mostly through song straight out of the horror movie canon, Sweeney Todd follows a wrongfully-convicted barber through his return to London, his relationship with an amoral pie-maker, and his eventual pledge to seek revenge on a corrupt judge and anyone else who might get in his way. This show is driven by the crisp, haunting, voice of star Peter Mackechnie (Hairspray, Rocky Horror Picture Show) and the impeccable comedic timing of Victoria McEwan (Hairspray), who handle the show’s demanding rhythm and dense plot with apparent ease.

In such a tightly-wound piece, however, even the slightest imperfection pops out: a chorus that never starts or stops singing at the same time, a gunshot that’s played seconds before the trigger is pulled, a leading lady with a beautiful singing voice and hilarious delivery but rarely both at once. Missed cues and forgotten lines hit the ear harder than any correct note or clever pun.

But it is precisely because I am able to nit-pick so many foibles and slip-ups that the Sweeney Todd’s consummate excellence is clear. There were no terrible performers; no glaring accommodations in plot or score. Except possibly for director Michael Wisniowski’s decision to replace sudden, intense murders with scenes of ambling symbolism, the show pulled every heart string and pushed every laugh. In all cases, the good outweighed the bad, the humour surpassed the foibles, and the delivery, both musical and dramatic, made SMCSU’s production of Sweeney Todd an evening of enjoyable theatre.

Sweeney Todd runs at Hart House Theatre for five performances:

Friday November 30th, 8:00PM
Saturday December 1st, 8:00PM
Friday December 7th, 8:00PM
Saturday December 8th, 2:00PM & 8:00PM

Audiences are warned of mature content and violence.

“This is exercise four. You need to write the capital of Canada.”

“Oh,” says the grade 9 I’m tutoring, “what’s that?”

A thousand readings and lectures flash through my mind – the roots of oppression, the colonization of the Americas, the myriad sociological, psychological, philosophical reasons a 14-year-old born in Canada would not know its capital.

“Ottawa,” I tell her. “The capital city of Canada is Ottawa. That’s where the Prime Minister lives.”

As she writes the answer on her worksheet and moves on to exercise five – identifying the Great Lakes on a map of the country – I reflect on the past sessions I’ve spent volunteering, for a few hours a week, at a high-risk high school in North York. The program, co-ordinated by the Center for Community Partnerships on campus, has been challenging and rewarding. Challenging because it demands waking up at six-thirty and working with thirty high-energy kids with smartphones and iPods and serious attitude for three straight hours on a Monday; rewarding because it lets me put school work and anxiety out of my head, at least for a little while. There are times, like when students in grade 9 ask about something they should have learned in grade 2, that academic notions creep back into my head and the students become subjects of thought. Mostly, though, they’re distracted, disrespectful, delightful nuisances.

The University of Toronto has a reputation for placing academics above social lives, extra-curriculars, and athletics; a reputation consistently upheld by its bookish students. This is nothing new, of course – UTians figured this out decades ago, and have been blogging about it since.* The problem is, we constantly frame it in the context of stress or of fun, and rarely consider the other possible side-effects of getting swallowed up by an undergraduate program.

One such side-effect is the theorization, abstraction, and lesssonification of our universes that comes from studying them. In the Humanities, at least, post-modernism is so heavily concerned with developing new terminologies and frameworks that it’s way too easy to see real, concrete things as avatars of their academic subjects. The screen you’re looking at – is it a computer monitor or a product of a neo-colonial system of exploitation? You see what I’m getting at – it happens every time you stop talking and start discoursing or dialoguing.

We need a balance. We need to offset the abstract world of our studies by entering the real world and realizing that, however meaningful an application of Standpoint Theory may be at the time, it’s not going to shade in those Great Lakes any quicker. The merit of the TDSB Tutors in Schools program and those like it – and there are many – is that the experiences are so real and so engaging that they offer perspective where it is otherwise absent. In doing so, they allow us to reflect with some degree of clarity on our own lives, academic or otherwise.

I highly recommend them.

*I might need a fact check on that…

Day 3: The Napping Seat.

I was all set to write a blog post about the best seats in the world on the TTC subway, and as I set out to google the image of that perfect seat, the first result I got was a picture perfect with the arrow done for me and everything…with the source from Blog UT!

Turns out a good 5 years ago, a lovely blogger by the name of Jermaine had already blogged about this.

(Source Here: The permalink is a bit wonky, which is why I attached a screenshot of the post )

Five years later, things have changed little. The best seats on the TTC train are still those ones, but now there are more of them. If you look at the picture in the blog post, the second seat counting from the right, these seats now have a plastic wall for you to lean and nap on now. What else? As mentioned in Blog TO:

The most noticeable change among the many — and the reason they will hold more passengers — is that the trains are now open-length, which means that a connecting passage allows riders to travel seamlessly from one car to the next (there are six cars in total). In an empty train, one can look straight from one end to the other.

On either side of this open seam, there are seats right next to the white walls of the train. Also a perfect place to lean against and nap on.

Three hurrahs for the Rocket and it’s brilliant napper-friendly designs! ‘Tis awesome!

Check out Louisa’s introduction to the challenge here.
Check out Day 1 of the challenge here.
Check out Day 2 of the challenge here.