Excellence and Engagement

I believe in standards of excellence in every form of constructive human endeavor. After all, who doesn't admire the star athletes, top scientists, model citizens, creative artists, and great inventors? They not only serve as inspirations for people as to what is possible, but also as pathfinders showing us the directions in their fields that hold the greatest promise. And their collective accomplishments are progressive in nature: they tend to build on what their predecessors did. Take machines such as the television or automobile. They are actually composites of many machines invented in earlier times for different applications that have been modified into more complex arrangements for new applications. One can observe the progression over the centuries of classical music into the baroque, renaissance, romantic, and modern forms, and the integration at various times of other world musical forms into the tableau. Sports have developed so much in recent years that it hardly seems worth the trouble trying to compare the athletic skills and accomplishments of our present-day athletes to those of-say, fifty years ago. The fields of mathematics, physical science, biology, medicine, and computer science all depend completely on this progressive excellence.

But that having been acknowledged, it must also be said that as a society, we tend to go a bit overboard in our competitive zeal for excellence. And sometimes excellence gets confused with perfection. I once took an intermediate-level Russian language class in college. At the beginning of the course, the professor made a statement that I found disconcerting: he said that, in his class, we students could say anything we wanted in Russian, but only if we said it correctly, without any mistakes. I suppose you may have figured out what happened: very few students spoke freely. For the correct way to learn and become fluent in a language, whether it is your first, native language or a second language that you pick up as an immigrant or visitor to a different land, is to speak us much as possible, assimilating as many words and concepts as soon as possible in as grammatically correct way as possible. Mistakes are a necessary part of the process. You encourage those who have mastered the language to correct you, nudging you to change specific areas when you err. But you never do anything to stifle someone's expression when they are trying to learn to speak the language.

About 26 years ago, I knew two Vietnamese women who came over to America during the mass boat exodus that was going on. One was very educated in her home country while the other was illiterate. The educated woman was very self-conscious about her speech and, although she could understand English quite well, she could still barely speak it even after one year here. The other woman, however, aggressively spoke to anyone who would listen to her, and she picked the language up rapidly! I'm sure that both of them eventually mastered spoken English because of its omnipresence in their lives. Personally, I am more like the one who didn't speak because she was afraid of being laughed at or ridiculed. I love foreign languages. I love to hear people speak them just to see how much I can understand. I also like to read them to see how much of that I understand. I have foreign language news broadcasts downloaded off the Internet onto my MP3 that I listen to often. One of my favorite TV shows is Despierta America, the weekday morning show that the Spanish language network Univision puts out, starring Fernando Arau and Ana Maria Canseco. In the past I've completed college courses in Spanish, French, German, Russian, Polish, and Japanese. I've studied Vietnamese and Chinese on my own and gained a little bit of confidence practicing speaking them with some wonderful people with whom I used to work in a Chinese restaurant. But I've never been out of this country and I've yet to become fluent in another language. By the perfectionist standards of some in our society, I don't measure up in this area. But that's somebody else's problem, not mine. I carry with me every day of my life a feeling of affection for these languages and their speakers. Maybe someday I'll attain fluency in one or more of them, but I don't feel that I have to be at the top in order to enjoy them as interests. I would like to get over my self-consciousness, though, and practice speaking them more to others. But I don't need to have becoming a super-linguist as a goal in order to enjoy studying foreign language at my own pace according to my own abilities! I appreciate excellence in areas of endeavor, but I also value engagement in them as well, even when this doesn't lead to the apex of achievement.