There It Is Again!

I never heard of sumac, not until I married my beekeeper husband. One afternoon he pulled over to the berm on a country road and opened the door.

“Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

In the thickets along the fencerow, round, red fruits grew on the hairy stems of staghorn sumac.

“This fall, I’ll harvest the sumac,” he told me, “and use it in the smoker to calm the bees while I take their honey.”

Suddenly, sumac cropped up all over the place—in old fields, at the edges of woods, at the sides of meadows and along highways.

“There it is again,” I’d say.

It’s called frequency illusion, the same impression you get when you buy a Prius and see them everywhere or you learn a new word and everyone begins using it.

What we focus on, we find.

Frequency illusions can be fun. You buy a new Apple watch and become part of a watch-wearing community, spotting your comrades at the gym and the airport and the grocery store.

But in the classroom, frequency illusion carries consequence. What you spotlight can impact a whole academic career, an entire life.

“Watch out for Jason,” a veteran teacher told me as a first-year teacher, “he’s a Cooper.”

So I watched. And I found what supported my hypothesis—a sullen face, a cocky walk, an unopened book, a dull look in the eye, a clenched fist. The more I fixated, the more Cooperish Jason became. And if a poem or a story or an idea ever lit a blaze or even a feeble spark, I never had the eyes to see. With me, Jason didn’t have a chance. I was too busy fighting the bad to detect any good.

But the longer I taught, the more I came to believe that my classes were not made up of good students and bad students. Rather that each of us, me included, is capable of good and bad. And that if I focus on the good, I find more of it.

Frequency illusion, after all, works both ways.