You didn’t
forget. You just didn’t care enough to
remember.
Those were the wise words of my junior high math
teacher. He said it all the time. In the context
of forgotten homework, forgotten classroom routines, forgotten report cards and
backpacks and lost pencils. He didn’t
use it in a passive-aggressive way—which certainly could be done, and would be
a mistake, given the power of the words when used without judgment or
manipulative intent. Like Mr. Pim. “You didn’t forget.” (Insert gentle shrug.) “You just didn’t care
enough to remember.”
It resonated with me because most of the time, he was
exactly right. I knew, even then, early
in my teens, that I’d never forgotten anything that really mattered to me. I had forgotten things I didn’t care
about. In school, certainly, but in
other stuff, too.
It’s about the value we place on things, and how that value
establishes our priorities.
I grew to use the saying myself. In my twenties, I used it, together with
tears and anguish, when a boyfriend forgot I needed him to attend an important
staff gathering and he bought tickets for a country concert—with another woman.
Who eventually became his
girlfriend.
I used it in my thirties, when I myself was a middle school
teacher, and wanted my students to evaluate their own academic priorities.
I have used it as a mother.
I said it this morning, in fact.
My son told me he’d forgotten to feed the cat. “It appears you didn’t care enough about this
task to remember. How can we make your
chores more of a priority for you?”
And I use this phrase in a constant conversation with
myself. I have a lot of things to juggle
every day, and there are a lot of ways to split my time. Sometimes, the things I have deemed less
important become things I forget to do.
They just slip my mind. Yet, when
I don’t take care of those things, I sometimes come off as scattered and
flighty. Like I can’t remember stuff.
But there’s a dirty dark secret about some parts of my
job. I should care about every aspect, but I don’t. I can’t.
An example: I don’t
really care about our monthly custodial inspections. That’s when one of our directors comes out to
our school and walks around the building with the custodian and I (“white
gloving,” they call it). We look at
every surface in the building. We follow
a checklist and assign a score to classrooms, restrooms, windows, desks, small-group
meeting space, the library, the gym, and every other nook and cranny in the
building. These inspections are valuable
in many ways: they give us a
standardized score for how our custodians are maintaining our school; they give
us specific areas to celebrate and specific areas to grow; and they keep us
accountable and focused. But the
inspection itself? Mind-numbing. When I tag along, like I’m supposed to do, I
look at my watch approximately five times a minute.
To be clear: I care
very much about our custodians, and about having a clean school, and about
accountability and assessment and comparing scores and goals and all of
that. I do. I just don’t care about the white-glove
inspection. Give me the scoresheet at
the end of the daggone thing, and I’m good.
But that’s not what I’m paid to do. I’m paid to participate in such things. I’m paid to make them a priority.
So: How do I attend to things I don’t care about? How do I make sure I remember the things I need to remember? I’ll share some specific ideas next week. See you then!
