I hit a wall this week. I was exhausted, burned out, and thinking that I chose the wrong profession. I started thinking that there must be a job out there that is easier, softer, less intense. I was so drained of energy that all I could think to do was sit in my meditation chair and stare off into space. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I needed ease in my life. I craved something easier, gentler than teaching. So I texted someone that I know has been stressed at work also and posed the question, do you ever think that there is an easier way? Did we choose something too difficult to do with our lives? Are we making life harder than it has to be?
I sent this person an example of an email that I had gotten that had referred to me as a saint for dealing with the things I was dealing with in my job. I had taken this email to mean that I was doing more than most people would tolerate and that I was being taken advantage of. I saw it as a red flag.
The person I had sent this to wrote back with a different perspective, that yes it could mean that I’m taking more crap than most people would and that that would be a bad thing, but that it could also mean that I’m patient and good at managing the things I choose to tolerate and that would be a good thing. Those words were powerful to me and immediately changed my attitude.
What I realized is that I could find an easier, softer way in life, but that it would not align with my values. I am just not an easier, softer way person when it comes to certain things. One of those things is teaching. It is my chosen career and I am good at it. I am passionate about helping children learn how to do life. I am passionate and enthusiastic about helping children learn how to think and learn, and how to do life. I have a master’s degree in early childhood education. I have been trained to see the whole child in the context of their mind, body, soul, their family system, and their community. I have the belief that children are capable, intelligent, creative, strong, feeling, sensitive, and autonomous souls.
My view from the beginning of my education career was to just support children. I never thought that my job was to impart great wisdom upon them or to indoctrinate them into thinking or behaving in certain ways. I always thought my role was to be the guide. I was the one with the flashlight shining away at things and letting them decide what they saw, what was important to them and what they wanted to look at closer. I never believed that children needed to be broken and led, saved and delivered, or recreated into something better. It is not easy to be in the profession of teaching when you are an idealist and not a realist. It is beyond easy to get caught in the spiral of overwhelm when dealing with children and families in the real world.
Don’t get me wrong, I see reality. I see it every day and some of it breaks my heart. I know that students as young as kindergarteners are facing poverty, addiction issues, abuse, neglect, crushing parent expectations, racism, classism, food insecurity, housing difficulties, transportation issues, isolation, societal pressure, and this year, fears about the health and safety of themselves and their loved ones. I see it, believe me, I see it. I feel it and it is crushing at times. It can make a grown adult want to throw up their hands in defeat and say it is too much, let alone five year old children.
What I have learned in my 10 plus years of teaching is that it is not my place to judge or save anyone. Not my students, not their parents or families, not other teachers and especially not myself. Not judging helps me to stay out of the savior space and helps me stay in the space of teacher. What that means to me is that I have a job to do. The job is to teach children. Not just letters and the sounds they make (but that is sooooo important too) but to teach them how to be themselves. Their beautiful, whole, lovely, powerful, intelligent, weird, difficult and amazing selves.
The easier and softer way would be to see all children as needy and to see myself as the giver of information. I would walk in daily with an agenda to teach content and stand and deliver. If something would arise that is not related to my information delivery or the meeting of my daily schedule, I would quickly extinguish it, punish it away, or ignore it and move on with my agenda. I would have a “not my problem” attitude or a judgmental attitude that allows me to feel superior and believe that these children are just bad and their situations are hopeless. That would allow me to come in daily, impart my content knowledge, file my papers and call it a day. I might say that those that want to learn will learn and those that don’t, it’s their choice. Every person has had an experience with this teacher, we usually don’t connect with this teacher and often comment that they should just retire and do something else.
Another easier, softer way would be to just stop teaching. I’ve done this. I stopped teaching for 8 years in a public school setting. I did this for a variety of reasons but the biggest reason was because my husband had a demanding job, I had a demanding job, and we had a demanding family life. Something had to give. What I realized during my time off from teaching in a public school setting is that I am a teacher. It is in my heart and soul. I cannot escape it and having a classroom with four walls and a sign on the door declaring it mine, is not what makes me a teacher.
I found that what makes me a teacher is my desire to grow. My desire to wonder. My desire to explore and experiment and to try and fail. My creativity, my organization, my connectedness with people and nature and animals. I am always learning and sharing my experiences. I want to be a part of someone else’s wonderings, their questions, their experiments, their tries and failures, their struggles and growth, their creativity and their making connections. It is exhilarating to be along side someone as they explore the world and test their limits. It is uplifting to share an energy space with someone who is finding out their capabilities, their limits and their innate goodness and connectedness. I found myself learning along side grocery store clerks, people in recovery, people in the library, people in my home and family. I found places to work where I got to help people connect to the natural world and I never felt more alive or inspired than watching that happen as I provided the guidance or the opportunity. As it happened over and over again, I realized that learning isn’t up to me, but providing the safe space for it to happen is.
This is not the easier, softer way. This requires me to be the safe space. I provide energy and opportunity for learning and growth to happen. I get to have plans and goals but I do not get to control how others grow and how they trust or don’t trust me. I get immediate feedback from the children in my room if they don’t feel safe and if they can sense that I am not accepting of their reality. It would be easy for me to demand that a child be ready to write a three letter word and to punish them for screaming at the child next them for taking the seat they wanted. It would be considered by some to be soft to allow that tantrum to happen and to not demand that that child straighten up, act right and get to work. I have my moments when I do not have the ability to allow the tantrum and I am not resourced enough to deal with it when it comes up, that is the human in me. I cannot give from an empty cup. Maybe I didn’t get a good night’s sleep or get a good breakfast. Maybe I heard someone comment about how loud my classroom was and question my ability to control my students. Maybe I’ve got a lot on my own mind with my own personal struggles and I cannot make the time to explore one more thing. When this happens, I give myself grace, do the best I can, and try again the next day.
My goal though, as a teacher, is to be the person who has time for the meltdown. To be the person who honors that part of the child who needs to be heard when their seat is taken. I want to be the teacher that knows that there is a lesson in it for the children and for me. There are lessons everywhere and if this is what arises in the moment, there is a lesson that is important, maybe more important that CVC words. On my best days, I let the child scream it out, stomp their feet and say that it isn’t fair and that they wanted that seat so bad. Why? Because I never allowed myself to yell and scream and say I wanted and needed something as a child. It wasn’t safe. I wasn’t safe because the adults in my life at home and at school did not have the time or space to honor my needs, to see me and my wants and needs as important, and they needed me to shut up and do what I was told. I never allowed myself to trust another human being with my upset, my rage, my fear, my frustration, or my neediness. Guess who has had a difficult time living life as a whole, real, imperfect person? Guess who disappoints herself over and over again in life because she doesn’t want to be seen as a pain in the butt or intrude on anyone else’s plans? Guess who plays small because she was never allowed to be big and whole and full and messy? Guess who swallows her wants, needs, insecurities, and passions because she thinks there isn’t room in her life, in her relationships, and in her career for them?
ME-it’s me! Me! Me! And it was killing me.
So to be the teacher I want to be, the one that aligns with my values and my deep knowing, I don’t get to take the easier, softer way most of the time. I sit with children on the floor as they scream, thrash, cry and kick in their ugly, big feelings. I let them know that their big feelings are real, allowed, and don’t scare me. I let them know that I am not too big to remember what it feels like when someone steals your chair or your spot in line. I also let them know that there are lessons to be learned when someone steals our chair or our spot in line and that I am willing to take the time to explore their big feelings about it without shaming them for having those big feelings. It takes so much time and effort. It is loud and messy and hard to handle, but that we can handle it.
My job is to be the adult in the room. The one that creates the safe space. In order to do that, I have had to do a lot of work myself. I have had to work with therapists who could help me grow up that little girl inside me that never got to be herself. I had to trust them in order to allow her to be reached, heard, and healed. I had to learn how to see her and what she had gone through as a child who was not allowed to be herself, feel and have her feelings and opinions, her creativity nurtured, her inconvenient truths, needs and desires heard and met. I meet her there now. I give her what she needs if I can and I allow her to scream and yell and learn in her own way. It is loud and messy and certainly not convenient. It has allowed me to see how damaging it is to children when we force them to sit down, shut up, obey and be good. How damaging it was to me.
So on days when I come home exhausted from breakdown after breakdown in my classroom, from interruption after interruption, from near constant needs being brought to my attention, it is easy for me to feel like I am doing something wrong, that my room is run amok with unruly children with crippling neediness and uncontrolled behavior problems. It is important for me to remember that this is the path I chose, not because it was the easy path, but because it was the path that would allow me to do what I do best. Teach. To create spaces where children get to feel safe enough to be fully themselves and to know that the adult in the classroom can handle how complicated, messy, ugly, beautiful, and difficult it is to meet them where they are in the moment. It is a huge responsibility and I have to have done my work in order to handle it. I have to take good loving care of myself. I have to get sleep, move my body, and eat good food. I have to take care of myself spiritually, mentally, physically, and emotionally. I have to seek help and support on my healing journey and surround myself with like-minded people who may not be doing life the easy way, but are doing life according to their personal values, so they can remind me that some things are worth the work, the effort, and the patience required to do it. I am hopefully teaching a new generation of children that they are worth it. That there is no thing in their world too small or big for me to care about and give attention to. That they matter, all of them matters, even the hard and inconvenient stuff.
I hope that I never stop teaching and that I never stop learning. I hope that this story inspires you, like it did me, to look at your life and see what aligns with your values and what you are willing to give your efforts to for the good of the world and others. I hope that you can see that some things are hard, and they will always be hard, but that they are worth the effort. I hope that you know that there will be days when you feel like you made a wrong choice and that it is too hard. That doesn’t mean you are doing it wrong. It is just a struggle that day. Take that day and rest, reach out to a friend who will support you, eat, listen to a meditation on self-compassion, and fill up your cup. Start again in the morning, knowing that life isn’t easy and following your path isn’t easy, but you can do it.