The First Pancake
Emily Apuzzo Hopkins | July 27, 2020
Yesterday I made some pancakes and bacon for my daughter... it’s one of our favorite lazy Sunday breakfasts. The salty, the sweet - it's heaven. But before that nutrition-less nirvana can be reached you have to get to cooking.
I was pouring the pancake batter into a few neat little circles, waiting patiently for the first flip. I flipped pancake number one and had a chuckle to myself, “Why is the first pancake always so terrible?!” It's so true though! Every time I make pancakes, the first one always has me questioning my culinary prowess. It's the pancake that I am always so happy to bury at the bottom of the stack.
I began to think of other “first pancakes” that I have experienced in my lifetime. At one point or another, we find ourselves doing something for the very first time. Sometimes our natural abilities outweigh our lack of textbook knowledge and we really appear to know what we are doing. And sometimes, there's pancake batter everywhere.
I began to think about my students over the years - some as young as one and now some as old as - well, adults. Later in my teaching career, I began to look at how I assess the new learners. When you think of a standard grading scale, you might think of 0 to 100 or F to A. You either fail, ace the test, or fall somewhere in the middle. But what if the lowest you could go wasn't failure? When trying something new, the fear of failure is what usually prevents you from ever putting yourself out there in a truly vulnerable sense. You might never agree to even give something a shot because of your real or perceived shortcomings.
I reframed the way I looked at the work my elementary students did, for example, particularly around performance. I had been introduced to the NDAE rubric and it was a game-changer for this recovering perfectionist. Simply put, the NDAE rubric gives you four stages of progress: Novice, Developing, Accomplished, and Exemplary - no failure in sight.
It took some convincing of my students to accept “Novice” as a perfectly acceptable place to be on a new instrument, a new skill, or a new piece. The fear of failure had been so ingrained in them over the years. It was my perfectionist children who suffered the most. “What do you mean I didn't get the highest grade possible?!” became a common chorus.
They learned (we all did) to accept that sometimes we aren't good at something not because we won't ever be, but because we have just been formally introduced. We have poured a bit of batter into the pan and flipped that flapjack only to realize it is the firstiest of first pancakes.
And it's okay.
Eventually, it gets buried. Eventually, better ones get made. Eventually, that first pancake becomes either a memory of the days gone by or something to proudly hold up to the light and exclaim, “I'm human! My pancakes are ugly, too!” And even though it may be buried down below and even though we wouldn't put it on the cover of any brunch magazines, it still tastes pretty damn good.
