I knew everything – until I didn’t

Matt Pearl

In my training as an educator, I was taught that it was vital for a teacher to reflect upon his or her performance, as well as upon student performances, for the purpose of deciding whether or not a classroom lesson was effective.

In my post-teaching life, I do the same thing I watched Dad do for years, and Bob Cobb before him: I pick up the paper after it’s off the press each week and look at the finished product.

And in the (rare) quiet times of my days on this earth, I reflect upon my life: my choices, my actions, my words and my relationships with others. The exercise led me to an astounding discovery:

Once upon a time, I was a teenaged know-it-all.

I was Matt Pearl, knower of all things, explainer of most and expert among experts. I knew all I would ever need to know – anything you could learn from a book or from a teacher, that is.

I schooled my peers in the meanings of poems and songs; I showed other people how to work their algebra problems; I knew how to load the high school pop machine; I had better-than-average working knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System.

What more did I need to know?

But in my eleventh grade omnipotence, there existed in the back of my mind a nagging, inconvenient nugget of truth. I ignored it and insisted that the skills that took my team to the State Academic Meet would carry me through all of life. But then that one little insecurity would squirm back into my conscious thought: Matt, you know about the world, but you don’t know how to survive in it.

And I was right. A class valedictorian and Missouri Scholar, I had poured my mind into books and into the acquisition of knowledge. What I often forgot to do was to look up from the text and observe what was really happening in the world.

So there I was, Matt Pearl, geometry problem worker, sentence diagrammer and junior Bob Dylan-ologist. And I couldn’t drive a stick. I had never thrown a hay bale. I didn’t know how to get to Maryville, where I was planning on going to college.

And when I got there and college started, I realized on the first day that I wasn’t sure how to get to Wal-Mart (it still had a hyphen in its name then).

It was through no fault of my folks: they had told me for the better portion of my 18 years that I needed to increase my awareness about what was happening around me. They also knew that for many of life’s major lessons, experience is a fine teacher.

So in my reflections upon my young life, I often find my present self wanting to go backward in time and to coach some sense into the teenaged version of me. I want to tell him to remain dedicated to his books and his quest to know things – that practice did me some good, once upon a time – but to couple his book-learning with a few general observations taken from life.

I’m still a bit of a bookworm. When I took the deck off my riding mower the other night to change the blades, I consulted the owner’s manual to learn the steps. It’s who I am. But I can tell you confidently that the 16-year-old version of me never would have tried to do something like that myself, and if Dad would have started such a project (and he absolutely did such things many times), I would have handed him a ratchet when he needed one, but daydreamed the rest of the time.

I knew everything – until I didn’t. But I have been convinced for many years now that we are not meant to quit growing when we stop getting taller. I know far less now than I knew then, but I am able to do far more.

Matt Pearl owns and operates newspapers in King City, Albany, and Grant City.