I used to teach English online to children in China. (I loved how cute and enthusiastic those kids were, but I don’t miss my 4:00 AM wakeup times!) The company I taught for had an elaborate curriculum for the students based on stories and games. One of the stories they presented was about an adventurous boy with a time machine, travelling back to the Stone Age. At the end of the lesson, I asked, “If you had a time machine, what time would you travel to?” I got lots of fun answers, from going back to see grandparents when they were young, to visiting the dinosaurs. My favorite was one little boy, who said in his perfect beginner level English:

I change my wrong things.

It took me a minute to get it, but the answer was brilliant: if he had a time machine, he would go back in time and fix his mistakes! 

I wanted a time machine last week, too. I’m teaching ESL to adults in person now. In our last class, I asked them what goals they had for the next module and looked up to see fifteen blank stares. I tried to rephrase, but their confusion only increased. I should have known this concept was beyond my beginner level students! Now what was I going to do? I was stressed about how to fill the remaining class time, and sorry to discourage these lovely, brave people who had come to a new land and were working so hard to learn a new language. Oh, to be able to go back to my lesson preparation session and tell myself, “Annette, that’s not going to work at all.”

The truth is, if I had a time machine, it would get a lot of use. But I don’t. So I have to learn to accept my mistakes, which are, after all, a necessary part of this human experience. When I taught the first day of a level 1 English class, I had two students come in and say apologetically, 

No English. 

“That’s okay,” I told them, “That’s what you’re here for.” Which was more English than they could understand, but I hope they understood from the smile on my face that we were here to learn together, and that mistakes were an essential part of the process. 

Likewise, it would be unkind and wildly unrealistic to expect perfection of myself. I recently read my journal entries from the months before that car accident happened and thought, “Wow, I was under a lot of stress. No wonder I missed that red light.” I took care to be a more attentive driver after that. And I am still very new in my career as an ESL teacher: my learning curve right now is about as steep as that of my students. Next time, I’ll come to class with some concrete examples of what a goal is.

Time, unfortunately, only travels in one direction. We can only move forward, learning and building on our experiences, the good and the bad. Because the truth is, we don’t move forward in spite of our mistakes - we move forward because of them. And that’s a comforting thought.