Tell Me About Yourself (What Part? Which Self?)/We’re All Mosaics

I despise the “Tell me about yourself…” question.

Tell you about myself?

What do you want to know?

My usual response to the “tell me about yourself” question, depending on who is asking, is to provide a brief summary of where I have been and where I am currently. I also try to add in a funny story or something that had happened that I found to be humorous, as a way to keep the mood bright.

Sometimes I am tempted to respond with something along the lines of “which self would you like to hear about?”

I don’t use that response as the person asking may not find it funny, but in some ways, it is an honest response.

My usual response to the “tell me about yourself” question, depending on who is asking, is to provide a brief summary of where I have been and where I am currently.

That seems a fair reply unless the person asking is more specific about which part of myself, they want to know about.

Recently, during a Zoom call with a recruiter I was asked the “tell me about yourself” question and a follow-up question which I was not expecting: “what do you do for fun?”

What do I do for fun?

The question totally caught me off-guard, which should not have happened, but it did. Quite embarrassing.

I was also concerned that my version of “fun” may sound extremely boring and may very well be extremely boring to the person asking.

So what do I do for fun? Well…

I spend a lot of time in several, excellent local bookstores as a significant part of my life is reading books and finding more books to read.

I am happy to recommend the The Grumpy Bookpeddler in Murfreesboro. And if you don’t mind the traffic, McKay’s in Nashville is awesome as well. A few years ago I bought the majority of Christmas presents for friends and family at Barnes & Noble using gift cards earned over 20 years as a rewards member. It was awesome.

I also like to go to the movies and there are four local cinemas all of which I regularly patronize. I am a proud AMC Stubs Premiere member and I will complain to management if the ICEE machine is broken or the popcorn is not fresh. My taste buds can tell the difference between fresh and stale popcorn.

I told all of this to recruiter and while I do not know this for sure, I am quite confident that both of my answers to her questions were not exciting enough. She did not express this, but I could tell her from her delayed reaction to what I had said that she was either confused or nonplussed or incredibly bored.

I had answered her question honestly, what else did she want?

Seeing her nonplussed look, I tried to further qualify my response by adding that reading books and watching movies is a great way of staying studied in the mechanics of the written and spoken word and that has direct application to the job that I was being interviewed for, which was a position for organizational content writing.

Obviously, knowing how people talk and like to hear others talk would be useful to the job I had applied for, right?

Right?

Despite my honest answer to her question, my additional qualification to my first answer did not seem to move the needle in my favor.

I am not certain of this, but I wonder if the recruiter found me too boring of a candidate. Would I have fared better if I had said that my idea of “fun” was to spend any and all free time trying to recreate the car chase from the 1968 Steve McQueen film Bullitt?

I do not live in San Francisco, but that should not be a problem if I got creative.

Photo for reference:

Better yet, while we’re talking about Steve McQueen, I should have told the recruiter that I spend all my free time trying to recreate Steve McQueen’s motorcycle chase from The Great Escape!

Photo for reference:

If I was being tested on how “interesting” I was as a candidate then I failed the test based on my responses to the questions of:

Tell me about yourself?

What do you for fun?

Writing from the comfort and safety of looking into the rearview mirror, I did not get an offer for that job and if I had know that my answers to the questions were destroying my chances of being hired, I would have offered different answers.

If I had to do it over and respond to those same questions as a more seasoned job applicant I would make it a point to say something along these lines:

There are a lot of pieces that make me who I am and if you tell me which pieces you want to know about then I will be able to give you a more accurate and honest answer as to who I am and what I enjoy doing.

Tell me about yourself?

Maybe the next time I am asked to talk about myself I will say there is a great song by the band Jimmy Eat World titled “Goodbye Sky Harbor” from the truly excellent album Clarity, and in the song there is a wonderful lyric that, perhaps, explains every person’s position on the world: “I am but one small instrument.”

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In January of 2005, I was working my way through an assignment for one the classes required for State Teacher Certification at the University of Texas at Arlington, and I had the idea that all people are mosaics in some fashion.

All people are sums of the pieces that they have collected and put together and all pieces work together to create a whole image.

An image for reference:

The origin for this idea can be traced as follows:

When I was in high school, I took Latin I & II as foreign language. Fascinating class. I wish I would have taken it more seriously.

One my favorite parts of that class was a reading assignment on Ancient Roman mosaics. Mosaics are like puzzles in that each individual piece is a necessary part of a collective image.

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The teacher certification program at University of Texas at Arlington was entirely online and so most of my interactions with my fellow, future teachers was through text exchange on discussion forums.

Once a semester I would meet with the other students on-campus for a special seminar and those once-a-semester meetings became the highlight of my time in the program.

You see, my perception of my classmates, who they were and why they were who they were, was similar to the mosaic that appears above.

If you focus on one, individual piece of the mosaic you only see that one, individual piece. It may be a colorful, interesting piece, but it is just one piece and it says nothing about the other pieces in the mosaic. Or, to be technical, it says nothing about what that one, individual piece is made from.

I had pieced together an understanding of who my classmates were based on pieces of information gathered from the interaction that we had with one another from the online classes.

I knew about my classmates, but I did not really know who they were.

That is to say that I based my perception of a person on what they had typed and posted to an online discussion forum. Maybe they included a picture of themselves for visual reference.

I was pleasantly surprised when I met my classmates in-person and saw them as whole and complete people. It made the months of mundane text-on-screen all the more worthwhile as we had all already cleared the social hurdles of small talk and “tell me about yourself” as we already knew what those pieces looked like from months of online interaction.

Sadly, the school I was placed at for my teaching practicum only had two other student teachers, neither of whom I had interacted with in those online classes. The other two teachers and I never moved past the small talk stage, and we never got to know one another. Maybe I should have tried harder, but I really did not see the point as once my practicum concluded I would receive state certification and we would all be moving on to find jobs as teachers and life goes on.

The two other student teachers from James Bowie High School in Arlington, Texas remain, in my memory, as people who I knew a little bit about and not much more. Fragments of a larger mosaic whose image remains incomplete.

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In 2005 I also had in mind that to be an effective teacher one has to set themselves aside.

One must be selfless. One must be committed to selflessness.

To be selfless is to put the needs of others ahead of my own.

To be selfless is to turn the focus off myself.

It’s not about me.

It’s a difficult and demanding process as it requires a person to curb or at least shift their focus away from the constant and evolving process of determining one’s concept and sense of self.

I have the utmost respect for my teachers as they were committed to selflessness.

To anyone interested in teaching or being an educator, selflessness is a key component.

A component that comes at a great cost, but the reward is infinite.

The professor of the class I was taking in January in the seemingly far-off year of 2005 was Dr. Nancy Hadaway.

She was an incredibly knowledgeable and supportive professor and I owe her continued thanks for motivating me to work through the difficulties that face every up-and-coming teacher.

Thank you, Dr. Hadaway.

All the above-mentioned ideas converged in my mind’s eye, and I knew that I was going to use the word “Mosaic” as the title of poem that was an expression of the process and rewards of selflessness.

The process and reward of giving oneself away for the benefit and enrichment of others.

I wrote Mosaic using Microsoft Word on a Dell desktop computer, a change from the pen and paper I normally used.

I sent the first version of Mosaic to the teaching assistant for the online class who was supervising our progress.

I wish I would have screen captured her response as she said she liked really liked Mosaic and that I should send it along to Dr. Hadaway who would appreciate reading it.

I never did send it along to Dr. Hadaway and I no longer can remember why.

So, I am assigning myself homework: I am going to write a letter to Dr. Hadaway and thank her for the part she played in my development as a teacher. I will also include the most current version of Mosaic as it has evolved and transformed over the years as I have evolved and transformed.

The full and most recent version of Mosaic can be found in my Facebook profile.

This is in no way an endorsement for Facebook.

Also, in my Facebook profile I am confident that I provide enough information to adequately satisfy the question of “tell me about yourself” and “what do you do for fun” as most of the quotes and pieces of information that feature in the profile I found from, you guessed it, reading books in my local bookstores and university libraries.

Tell me about yourself.

Well, I am a mosaic of the people that I have met, the books that I have read, the television that I have watched, the movies that I have seen, the music I have listened to, words that I have heard, faces that I have seen, experiences that I have lived, the choices that I have made and my hope is that I will give away more than I have received.

Please do me a favor and remember this for all time: we’re all mosaics. Every piece of the mosaic is significant. Every piece of the mosaic is meaningful. Every piece of the mosaic matters.