Sometime this past fall, my students became my enemies. I had to fight them to get them to learn anything. They were rude, disrespectful, ungrateful, and unkind. They talked back, talked over, lied, and threw tantrums. They needed my help, but refused to listen when I tried to support them. The only thing consistent about them was their irrationality.
Furthermore, my workload was unmanageable. Grading and planning and teaching and reporting shrunk my personal time to nothing. I hated weekends where I was scribbling lesson plans on Saturday mornings and responding to emails late Sunday evening. I loathed the frequent late week nights required of me to help families in their search for a best fit high school. Every email asking me for something else made my skin crawl.
Was it true? Sure.
Was it the only thing that was true? Absolutely not.
This year, I had to decide if my work was to be around changing the circumstances or changing the narrative I had constructed around them.
It is not always true that we must abandon ship at the slightest hint of dissatisfaction, as our culture suggests. We currently elevate the pursuit of happiness as the key to life. Get a new cell phone every two years. A new car. A new marriage. A new job. Life can have the feeling of being disposable.
However, throughout history, people have endured, and thrived in, the most horrific of circumstances. Even when they cannot change them, they have managed to find happiness in the darkest of spaces. Perhaps most famous mentor on this topic is Victor Frankl, a German psychologist and Holocuast survivor, who said, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” He noticed in the concentration camps that there were those who died from the psychological burden, but also noticed there were those who were able to survive. In his eyes, the difference was perspective; it was the story these people told themselves that most mattered.
Now, least you think I am comparing my teaching experience to being in a concentration camp, I want to assure that I am not. In fact, I teach at an incredibly life-affirming school. Many of the complaints teachers cite for burn out- lack of support, lack of agency, test-centricity, boredom, isolation-- are not the issues which I have faced. The school is highly collaborative, the professional community is smart and loving, and the curriculum is ours to generate and mold as we deem necessary.
Despite this, I have found myself inching towards the door, a glance cast permanantly back in wonder that I would even consider leaving. After all, if I can't survive such a teaching utopia, with so many parts that I love, how can I trust this urge to move on? How do I know I will not always be slightly dissatisfied, and I just need to dig deeper? I just need to sit longer, sleep better, exercise more-- really amp up the self care-- and dig back into the work itself, of challenging young minds to explore the world through text.
Could I just change the story? After all, I created a narrative of burn out for myself.
Furthermore, it is hard to escape this belief that I'm a mindfulness failure. Shouldn't real mindfulness ninjas be able to sit with anything and maintain peace and equanimity? In recognizing these stories I have created, shouldn't I just be able to sit with those thoughts and move on?
If I HAD to stay, I probably could do all these things and find ways of sustaining. But I also have the freedom to choose a different situation. Perhaps something where I don't have to work so hard to change the story because the reality presents fewer challenges. Or maybe the challenges are just different ones that I want to tackle, rather than shirk from.
I have always said teaching middle school provides unlimited "opportunities" to practice mindfulness. It's a great training ground for noticing my own way of being when challenged. But perhaps it's okay to go down a level to a place where the obstacles are not so constant and demands so not rigorous. Perhaps a move made in self-preservation is not failure but an opportunity to grow in a different way.
After five years of teaching at my school, I have decided to move on. Interestingly, in doing so, my narrative shifted naturally. Suddenly I felt so grateful for the care my students could muster for one another at unexpected moments. I saw their brilliance and appreciated their struggle to become fully formed people in a world that doesn't always treat them kindly. I saw their desire to learn, and frustration when they felt they couldn't, clearly again. I saw their beauty.
And the work seemed to ease up. I remembered to set time limits and say enough was enough. I got excited about learning how to engage students more deeply in the process of grappling with complex text. And I extended myself to pursue projects that I felt most excited about--teaching mindfulness to anyone who would have me in their classroom.
In the end, it took letting go of my position to shift my narrative. I reconnected with my deep love for my students. I found more forgiveness. I felt capable and effective again. These were all things that were there throughout the year too, but weren't as much a part of the prevailing story I had constructed. I am now weaving them back through, even as I prepare to depart.
I have wondered if this means I should stay. Maybe I just said it was unbearable to justify leaving, and now I have proven myself wrong. But that unease this year gave me the freedom to explore other opportunities and reinvision a life where I can give more to the world. I can be a better version of myself. So I will still move forward in pursuit of growth, while soaking in the new warmth towards what is true now. And I am grateful for it all.
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