Obviously

You don't know what you don't know. That should be a quote from Yogi Berra. I went to a seminar last week on a subject that I felt very comfortable in. I was assuming that it would be a great opportunity to catch up on my sleep and maybe get a little work done. Wrong. It was fascinating and as I sat there taking it in, I realized that there is so much that I don't know. This strikes me as odd, because most of the time I am amazed by what other people don't know. I just take it for granted that everyone knows everything that I know. I assume that when someone blows up at me that they know that I know that they are trying to control my behavior with negative reinforcement and that I sit and I choose whether I care to accommodate their opinion or not. It occurred to me recently that maybe they don't know about the concepts of psychology that I studied in college. But I digress.

In my class, I keep telling my students--this is easy--you know this. They look at me dubiously, but they are nice enough to nod their heads after I explain it, that it makes sense. I developed a jeopardy game for my level 2 class about introduction to law. I made the questions to the topics that I introduce to my students. They are about the three branches of government, checks and balances, a little on the 1st, 4th and 5th amendments to the constitution and about people you find in a courtroom. Really basic stuff in my mind. My students did ok, not great, on my test run through with them. Then I presented the game at my Toastmasters Club. Out of fifteen, only two people answered more than a 2 or 3 out of the 20 questions. The majority didn't know any of the questions. One of the people who answered about 10 out of the 20 is a retired history teacher and the other went to law school.

Dad said, well, I couldn't name world leaders and I consider myself to be pretty informed. Sarcuse--that's the French guy I couldn't remember. Kim gil young--I think that's the North Korean guy. Did he have a stroke? How can he still run the country after a stroke? Oh well.

My point I guess is that I don't know what I don't know and one of the things that I didn't know was how little everyone else knew compared to how much I thought they all knew and even more frightening, how little I knew compared to how much I thought I knew. I really enjoyed that seminar. It's like I opened this door to a new room filled with cool stuff to explore. Its really too bad I have so much junk on my desk and no time to get to the fun stuff for a while.