Three-ringed binders, sharpened pencils, shiny lunch boxes, cool book bags … September evokes classroom memories. For some, those recollections include dismal memories of feeling stupid.

I recall learning – or rather, struggling to learn – how to do long division. I stood at the blackboard praying that the solution to the problem would miraculously spell itself out in the chalk dust. The problem in front of me was “49 divided by 7.” I kept mumbling the question that the teacher had posed: “How many times does 7 go into 49?” But this didn’t help, because the question itself made no sense to me. The very language defeated me. What does it mean to say that one number goes into another number?

Over time I learned to arrive at the correct answers to such problems but only years later, when I encountered “new math” as an adult, did I realize that it wasn’t my stupidity that prevented me from understanding long division. The new math approach clarified mathematics for me, revealed to me its perfect logic. At age 26, I understood for the first time how a variety of mathematical processes were related to one another. I thought: “If only I had been taught this way as a child, it would have made sense to me; it would have been easy; I would have liked it.” Instead, I felt stupid.

Children are so vulnerable to feeling stupid. There is, after all, so much that children don’t yet know. Once I watched young children engrossed in decorating pumpkins for Halloween. There was a festive atmosphere as little hands mixed paint colors and dabbed the pumpkins. Then a mother near me exclaimed in a tone of disgust: “Black! Why are you painting it black?” The room became quiet in response to her shrill voice, but she didn’t seem to notice, and she went on relentlessly, ending her tirade with “Black’s not a Halloween color!” Several of us looked up in surprise. She realized her mistake, and tried to recoup, muttering, “Well, black is a Halloween color, but I don’t know why you’d want to paint your pumpkin black! Look at all the pretty colors here, why don’t you use green or red or blue?” The child she was addressing couldn’t have been more than three years old, too young to defend herself, even in her own mind, against her mother’s judgment that she had done something unbelievably stupid.

It’s hard to imagine a child growing up totally unscathed by criticism. Most of us will endure feelings of being stupid as the result of our struggles to learn something new, our failures in areas where we aren’t especially gifted, our siblings’ teasing when we have blundered. As an adult, I discovered new math and realized that this approach would have transformed the learning of mathematics for me. But as a child, I would never have attributed the difficulty I had to a poor instructional approach. Neither would I have speculated that some of my difficulties were probably just a natural part of the learning process, just part of being human. Instead, I saw my bewilderment as another sign that maybe I was “just stupid.”

So the September blind spot of the month is a basic fact about ourselves that many of us lose sight of, the fact that we are only human. No one can know everything; there is no one to whom every skill and area of knowledge comes easily; learning is a process that takes time and patience. One of the stories that I recount in Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things is the story of a young boy who is helping a painter prime a wall. Watching him, his older brother sneers and says “You’re doing a terrible job!” The younger child doesn’t miss a beat. He simply says “Of course I am. It’s my first time. I’m just learning.”

In the midst of struggling to prove that I was smart, I achieved a PhD, became a college professor, and set perfection as my standard. Talking with a friend about the burden of making perfection my goal, I remarked “But if I’m only human…” She interrupted and reminded me, “Madeleine, there’s no ‘but’ there.”

In an attempt to defend our self-images as intelligent people, some of us forget that there is no “but” there. We are only human.

Children go off to school this month, teachers prepare to meet those bright faces once again, and adults smell fall in the air and remember their own school days. Let’s hope that more of us, more of the time, can remember that we are only human, and adopt the matter-of-fact acceptance of our own humanity that the younger brother showed. The less we have to defend ourselves against feelings of stupidity, the more we might discover the joys of ignorance — that is, the absorption and exhilaration of learning something new.