Secretly Cheering for Us

There’s a tension I sometimes feel as a teacher (and as a parent, friend, son, and colleague). It’s the tension between giving my students room to express their creativity, curiosity, and authentic selves, and reinforcing the roles that school, society, and culture have taught us adults that we’re supposed to play.

In the classroom, when the noise level gets too high or the conversation steers away from the topic I planned, my impulse is to steer it back to where it’s supposed to be: quieter and focused on the class topic. That’s what the classroom is supposed to look like.

As a dad, when my five-year-old was spinning around the kitchen with food in his hands, my impulse was to tell him to sit down and eat at the table. That’s the way we're supposed to eat.

For myself, when I feel inspired to say something new or take actions in an unconventional or untrodden way, my thinking generates all sorts of reasons why I should stay in my lane and carry on.

There’s always been and there always will be a pull to the accepted, expected, or conditioned way of doing things. We may always tend to see things as we’ve been taught to see them, to act in ways that are acceptable and socially safe to act, to resign ourselves to our lot and hope for the best.

But that doesn’t mean it’s what’s best for us or for others. And it doesn’t mean that we have to live that way.

Resignation, frustration, overwhelm, stress, and cynicism are optional approaches to the challenges we face personally and collectively. We can thrive in life no matter the circumstances - and anyway, despite the pull to the status quo, society is secretly cheering for us to wake up and bring our innate, creative, and passionate genius to live a more compassionate and enjoyable life for ourselves and others.

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️

Made-up Distinctions

We humans like to categorize. It keeps us organized and helps us survive and succeed. One seemingly useful categorization is that the classroom is for the mind, the athletic field is for the body, and the Church is for the spirit.

But many of the categories we create, including the ones above, are actually illusions. Useful illusions, but made up all the same.

Over the last year or so, I've been exploring the idea that there's no distinct mind, body, and spirit that a human "has." What if I am not a being who has a mind, a body, and a spirit, but instead I am mind, body, and spirit in one being. It's a subtle difference, but I like it.

The made-up distinction between mind, body, spirit, and Self is perhaps no longer useful in education. The question for us as teachers then becomes how can we best encourage and guide the development of the whole student?

Teaching physics and computer science content is just one of my goals with my students each day.

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️

"To educate is to guide students on an inner journey toward more truthful ways of seeing and being in the world."

-Parker Palmer in The Courage to Teach

No Matter How Crappy We Can Be

When one of my kids entered kindergarten, we found him irascible and a bit mean at the end of the day. We wondered what was going on, and we figured that this behavior was probably showing itself at school too. When we asked his teacher about it at our first parent-teacher conference, the teacher said that he is wonderful during the day - thoughtful, caring, and engaged - and that he’s probably just exhausted from being “on” all day.

It became so much easier to be with him after that. We gave him the space to be expressed however he was feeling, we stopped taking it personally, and we were able to love who he was no matter how much he seemed to hate us some evenings.

As our kids enter their teens, we’re seeing some of that behavior again. It’s a relief to find a lot of room still available to love my kids despite how they show up sometimes. Not to condone mean or disrespectful behavior, but to bring compassion and understanding.

Compassion and understanding feel better than anger and frustration. They diffuse heated situations. They suck the oxygen out of the flames of anger. They're also more effective at settling emotions all around. They soften the rock and hard place that our kids, our spouses, and our students sometimes find themselves between.

For some reason, sometimes it's easier to bring compassion and understanding to strangers than to people we're close to. No matter who we're with, though, we've always got the capacity to bring compassion and understanding. It always makes a difference for us and others.

When we've seemingly reached our own limits and crossed the threshold into exhaustion and our own "witching hour," isn't it nice when someone else gives us the grace of compassion and understanding?

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️