Why “I Don’t Know” Became the Most Important Phrase of My Teaching Career

I vomited in the faculty restroom my first day of teaching. I was terrified that the students were going to ask me questions for which I did not have answers. I taught out of the religion department at an all-girls high school. Anyone who studies theology and philosophy (responsibly) knows that those subjects contain many more questions than answers.

It wasn’t just that I was scared that I wouldn’t have answers. It’s that I knew I was not going to have all the answers, and I knew how frightening it can be to be sixteen and realize that adults, even adults with master’s degrees and authoritative titles like “teacher,” don’t know everything, not even answers to the most important questions. Why do bad things happen to good people? What is love? What is the point of getting out of bed in the morning?

I felt prematurely guilty for possibly being the one to drag these students into that place where things feel a little less safe because the person in charge does not have a clue.

I don’t remember the first time I had to tell a student that the best answer is that we don’t know. It’s a common thread in theology, no matter what your belief system. Believers usually say that you have to let go and surrender what you don’t or can’t know to a higher power; absurdists suggest that nothing has a point, including your question; agnostics get to be truly consistent with the tender explanation that not only do we not know, we cannot know. This, of course, drives my students nuts. They want the security of something solid.

Epistemologists can expand on not just whether or not we can think we know, but whether or not knowing is a concept that is valuable to use at all, since knowing and believing can mean very different things. Many beliefs aren’t justified or true, and plenty of knowledge isn’t actually believed at all.

Steinbeck called the discovery kids have that adults don’t know everything, or realizing that adults think they know but have it wrong, “an aching kind of growing.” I learned that it becomes a sustainable pain if adults don’t lie about it. It’s tempting to tell students that there are definitive areas of right and wrong, that things are black and white, that we know why we’re here and what happens to us after we die.

But we do them a disservice by not teaching them to wrestle with questions and rest with the unease of mystery. We need to teach our students, our kids, and ourselves that it’s okay to admit that we don’t know. Otherwise we end up feeling resentful, accusatory, and terrified when we realize that we thought we knew, and we were wrong. Learning to breathe through the unknown might be the best lesson my students ever taught me.