Growth Mindset Challenge: Sharing with Someone

I'm with my dad this weekend, and he loves to watch movies; if a movie has an actor that he likes in it, he will watch that movie no matter what. So, because he is a big fan of Meryl Streep, we watched a movie with Meryl Streep on Saturday which neither of us had seen: Florence Foster Jenkins. (That's the Wikipedia link for the film, and here's the Wikipedia article about the actual woman on whom the film is based.) This is the trailer:

So, I loved this movie, and so did the nurse (my dad is on full-time hospice care), but my dad did not like it at all. He disliked it so much that he even paused the movie part-way through to say, "What the hell is this movie supposed to be!?! Is it a comedy or a tragedy?" And I told him I thought the movie was just true to life, and that we could probably all relate to one of the characters. That was how I felt anyway: even though none of the characters was "like me" in some literal sense, I felt really connected to them all.

After the movie we talked about it, and I told my dad about using growth mindset to help me in my writing and in my teaching, and especially about how important feedback is. People were scared to give Madame Florence the feedback she needed to really improve as a singer, which is too bad in the sense that she probably could have learned to be a better singer... but regardless, she had faith in the power of music to bring her dreams to life, and she never gave up on her dreams. And along the way she brought a lot of joy to people in different ways, and when she died, she was dreaming about how she had performed at Carnegie Hall. At the very end we got to hear Meryl Streep singing the way she really can sing (she is a great singer!), and it was just beautiful. Anybody who brings more beauty into the world gets my support.

My dad, on the other hand, is very judgmental and competitive, so for him it was hard to understand that something could be valuable in and of itself, not based on how it is judged, and not based on being "objectively" the best. That attitude was really hard for me as a kid, and I guess a big part of how I became the person I am is reacting negatively to that, trying to break out of those limitations. That's why growth mindset means a lot to me and has helped me a lot as a teacher and as a learner (and we are all learning something in our lives, all the time, not just in school). I don't think what I said about growth mindset made my dad like the movie, but at least I think he understood why I liked it so much. It also helped him understand more about my approach to teaching (my dad was also a college professor, but he became a professor because he was totally involved in his research; he never wanted to teach except for graduate students that he was training in research).

We watched that movie in the afternoon, and after supper we watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Luckily, he liked that movie a lot! We both like science fiction, so that's always a good option. :-)

And here's a quote poster I made with something that the real Madame Florence reportedly said, and it's one of the best lines in the movie:  "People may say I can't sing," she once remarked to a friend, "but no one can ever say I didn't sing." (source)

Made with Automotivator

using this portrait of Jenkins.