It’s just about asking question

Today Russ and I kvetched in my office about the nature of working in higher education. I think we both run up against the difficulty in ‘making’ people care about whatever subject we’re teaching. I get frustrated by seeing people in my office who are ‘nice’ but are not (at least on the surface), critical thinkers. They create classes that will pay them to teach, but don’t actually like the act or art of teaching. Because I live my life in perpetual angst around the BIG questions of life/love/existence I don’t understand how others can simply…get a paycheck.

In a few weeks I’m speaking at a conference on boundaries, asked by my friend Tabbi to share my ‘expertise’ with these foster youth on how to advocate for their personal needs. When writing my blurb for the conference brochure I had this horrifying thought….is my community college dumbing me down? I have hopes and goals and thoughts that get stifled in the awful bureaucracy that is community college. Perhaps I will always live in a sea of angst around the big ideas. I remembered, by writing about my life, what I’m actually capable of, and how I get sucked into idly pinning things onto pinterest to distract me from the utter frustrating tasks I’m asked to do in a program that is doing things very inefficiently.

It makes me think of two things…a) how is Ebola not spreading? I’ve seen the incompetence at the governmental agency of education, it’s totally not surprising that the one nurse called the CDC with concerns and they gave her the go-ahead to fly, even though she was actually contagious. There are super inefficiencies happening on every level of government and agency that I have worked at. And b) I ask a lot more questions than I have answers to.

This afternoon I went into a woman’s office, who teaches every quarter in addition to administrative salaried duties, even though she “hates teaching.” She does it for the paycheck, and should be removed from the position of instructor. And when I was telling her about how I raise current events in my class, she said something that I feel sheds profound light on what my angst is about. She asked, “what do you do if you don’t know the answer to one of their questions?” I was basically dumbfounded, mostly because I rarely have any answers to my students questions (in regards to the current events). What I do have is questions. And I acknowledge their questions. And I ask for feedback from their classmates. I help facilitate a discussion, a dialogue about what we know, what we don’t, what we’d like to know, and we often end in a messy unsolved way. The goal is critical thinking, not giving them answers to questions. She clearly felt uncomfortable with that answer. She clearly didn’t want students to ask her questions that she didn’t have the answer to. She clearly wanted things right or wrong or neatly packaged. And that is probably why she hates teaching. Because she feels like she has to do it all, and that’s really exhausting.

I don’t know if I’ll ever run out of questions. I think my asking questions is annoying to my own psyche, because answers aren’t readily available, and yet it’s this thing that keeps me alive.

Teacher Discouragement: How Being a Yoga Student is Helping Me See My Student’s Differently

Yesterday’s class sucked.

I don’t think I went into the afternoon session with a foul attitude, though the one repeat student did ask me before class “um, are you okay, you look upset?” At any rate, we got started and the whole vibe was just off and this is repeatedly wearing me down, despite the good heart-to-heart conversation I had with them a few weeks ago. It just feels the same, and I want to focus on the 10 students who are paying attention, but I get distracted by the remaining students who are screwing around, or sleeping, or just generally spaced out not paying attention.

And so, when I let my class out early, I posted about my chronic discouragement on Facebook, with a somewhat plea for ideas…and the things that I was given back only futhered my frustration with the whole day. It feels like the people who responded, also teachers themselves, just didn’t understand what I already do in my classroom. Calls for using humor, more youtube clips, asking them about their interests, are all well and good…and things I do already…but at the end of the day, I also have to present to them material from the course and expect that the soft-skills of being able to FUCKING SIT IN YOUR SEAT FOR A GODDAMN 20 MINUTES AT A TIME isn’t too much to ask for. How are they ever going to get a job, if that’s what they indeed want, with their milling-around slacker attitudes?

In my almost-ragey attitude, I headed home and off to yoga. Where I proceeded to feel just as angry and this time, not only at my day and my students, but myself. The poses seemed more challenging than before, my mind wouldn’t shut up, I became hyper critical and noticed all the others around me. It didn’t matter that my instructor was positive, gave compliments liberally, and believed we could all do our best. It. Did. Not. Matter. I sat there on my mat, grumpy, almost determined to have a shitty class, and fumed. My day had been shit. My class was going to shit. And my best friend practicing next to me looked like a yoga goddess and it didn’t matter that I knew she cried at work and had as shitty of a day as me. I was in a place of glump.

But even though my brow was furrowed and I didn’t want to be there anymore (but you can’t very well just huff out after only 4 poses), I could tell that I was my student. For whatever reason they can’t get outside their heads, their past experiences, and no matter amount of coaxing, sweet-talking, gentle chiding, sarcasm, humor, or exasperation is going to motivate them to get off their butts and onto their mat and try Trikonasana if they don’t want to. Because anything short of that instructor marching over to me and physically manipulating my limbs into a contorted pose I was NOT going to do it.

I’d like to think it helped me have clarity about my own circus-monkey act in front of my class. But I was still angry and resentful and discouraged when I left, though this blog post was milling about in my mind, so there was probably some movement at least. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I teach them tomorrow. How I’m going to react. If I’ll use more humor, or You Tube clips, or whatnot. But I can’t do the work for them, and I saw that pretty clearly in yoga. She provided the space, and it was up to me to bring my game. And it was my deal when it didn’t go as planned.