(The following is the introduction to my latest book, Self-Care for Educators.)
I was sitting in the back of my Weight Watchers meeting when I clicked on the notifications on my phone and immediately wondered what the hell was happening. I very quickly realized that something I said during a training I conducted for teachers a few days prior had gone ‘viral’ (and by viral, I mean that within one day of the original posting, a meme attributed to my name had been reacted to 6.2K times, there were well over 404 comments on one site where it was posted, and that same site indicated 7.3K shares). Whaaaaat?????
I’ll be perfectly honest with you… my very first thought upon learning that something I said had gone viral was this: Holy crap, I hope I didn’t screw up the research. And then I scrambled to Google Scholar and typed in some key phrases and was so unbelievably relieved to see that YES, numerous articles, education blogs, and reports backed me up. Thank God.
You see, during that training with teachers, I said this: ‘Teachers make more minute by minute decisions than brain surgeons… and that is why you’re going home so exhausted each day’ but I didn’t make the meme (prior to that day I wasn’t even sure what in the heck a ‘meme’ was—if you’re also unsure, see my meme below) so seeing this ‘out there’ stunned me. I didn’t choose to go viral; I didn’t want to go viral. I didn’t even ‘approve’ having a meme made of something I said in a workshop. But welcome to 2016, I guess. It’s out there. Forever.
I felt anxious and twitchy and nervous for a few minutes and then if I’m going to continue being totally honest, I got kind of excited as I wondered if maybe I should expect a phone call from Oprah or Ellen (or maybe they’d team up and call me together? Yes, yes, that’s exactly what would happen) and maybe someone would beg me to do that TED Talk that I’ve been formulating in my mind and I’d then get my own TV show and newspaper column… and I allowed myself to feel even more excited. Maybe this was my break-through moment. Eeeeeeeee!
But then I made the horrendous mistake of reading the comments on one of the sites that shared my quote. I KNOW better. I really do. But I did it anyway. For every wonderful shout-out to a teacher there were (grammatically incorrect and highly misspelled) posts about lazy teachers, teachers who only teach half the year, how stupid this data is, how dumb (actually spelled ‘bumb’ in the comment) teachers are, how ‘Boogren’ looks like ‘booger,’ how teachers are overpaid… and I couldn’t stop reading them. I should have stopped but I couldn’t. I even clicked on the replies to the replies to the comments and I felt myself sinking into my chair, paralyzed by the hate, wanting to jump in and defend (but knowing damn well that that’s a TERRIBLE idea on all accounts), and wishing that it would kind of just go away because now I’m feeling really exposed and vulnerable (and let me remind you that I’m at a WEIGHT WATCHERS MEETING where I just stripped down to my tank-top and shorts to get on the scale in front of a stranger—as if that didn’t make me feel vulnerable enough).
I continued to feel anxious and weird and I was drawn to my phone again and again to see if this thing was still being shared—and it was—hours later. I eventually pulled on my tennis shoes and went for a walk where Elizabeth Gilbert whispered in my ear (via her Podcast, Big Magic, pumped through my headphones) about doing scary things and being brave and not reading reviews—‘Reading your reviews is like eating a sandwich that might have glass in it,’ she said—and deciding which part of your life you want to be your ‘real’ life and which part is your ‘fake’ life and how to bring light to the one that feels scarier but makes your face light up when you think about it.
I kept walking and thinking about her advice and when I’d check in with my body I’d realize that my stomach was still sort of flipping around from my words spinning around the world and I decided this: You know what? I DO have something to say. And rather than getting into a online shouting match with someone who writes ‘your’ instead of ‘you’re’ I’m going to be civilized and write this out in an essay, or maybe even a book. Because here’s the deal. I’ve worked with A LOT of teachers in my career. Do I fully, fully, FULLY admit that there are some very bad ones in the mix? You bet your ass I do. I’ve seen them. I’ve coached them. I’ve observed them. They’ve made me cry. Can I tell you story after story about the ridiculous things that they do? How they go out of their way to be ‘intentionally disinviting’ to their students? Yup. I could go on and on and on.
But I choose not to. Because for every ‘hanging on the bottom rung teacher’ there are ten others, working their asses off to be ‘intentionally inviting’ to their students, often to the detriment of their own families, health, and sanity. And these are the teachers that need someone’s spotlight to shine a light on them and to share their stories with the public who thinks it’s ok to call teachers lazy, stupid, and ‘bumb’. Oh no you don’t… not around MY quote you don’t.
The thing about teaching/teachers is that we (the public) all feel like we know exactly what they do because we had teachers ourselves. But this is like thinking we know what it’s like being a barista because we drink coffee. Or a bus driver because we ride the bus. Or a pilot because we’ve flown a lot. Teaching isn’t the same as it was when you were in school—guaranteed. Even if you were in school yesterday, I guarantee you that teaching is different today. Because it’s AL-WAYS changing. (What’s not changing, by the way, is the pay.) And because we feel like we ‘get’ a teacher’s job, we also feel like we have the right to comment, to judge, to evaluate, and to criticize. But we don’t. Unless you’ve observed, interviewed, and stood next to real teachers in a real school for days upon days, both in the school and on their own time, you don’t get to publically share your sweeping opinion about ‘all teachers.’
Actually, that’s not true.
And here’s the part that really stings. Teachers are public servants and folks absolutely have a right to share their opinion about us. Just as we do for our police officers, our President, our doctors. But it hurts when you’re one of them and you intimately know the other side; the ‘non-public’ side.
For teachers, that side is the hours spent revising lesson plans to ensure that you’re challenging your advanced students as fairly and as appropriately as you’re supporting your students who need more time or a different mode of communication. It’s the late nights at school coaching, sponsoring, cheering, meeting, and fretting. It’s never feeling fully present with your family because your students also feel like your family and when they’re not with you, you’re not sure how much love they’re getting. It’s never feeling fully present with your students because you’re carrying guilt about spending your evening at home grading papers. It’s paperwork, paperwork, paperwork—so much paperwork that it’s eating into your ability to be totally focused on your students, even though that’s all you want to be. It’s figuring out how to provide feedback that strikes that precarious balance between loving and pushing; between pointing out what’s correct and also being honest about what’s entirely off the mark and what to do next. It’s hours spent with colleagues, focused on one student, when there’s also ten more who need this attention, too. It’s presenting a lesson while also being aware of the individual behavior of each student in your classroom in order to direct the appropriate attention, support, love, and discipline that each child needs. It’s testing and tests and facing unfair consequences because of one test, meant only to be a snapshot in time. It’s having a perfect day when no one visits your classroom and then having everything fall apart when twelve visitors arrive for Instructional Rounds. It’s setting up field trips and guest speakers and parent volunteers—tasks so monumental that planning a wedding suddenly feels like a cakewalk.
And that’s only half of it.
I’ve been honored to bear witness to these teachers over the course of my career and I’m continually contemplating the question, ‘How else can I help?’ How can I ease the burden, honor the work, and sing the praises of our hard-working, dedicated, passionate teachers beyond what I provide during my trainings? What I’ve settled on is self-care. Small tweaks and reminders and (most importantly perhaps) permission for teachers to take care of themselves. Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But it’s not. The teachers that I meet that are the shining stars are oftentimes putting themselves at the very bottom of their own priority lists. And I fear that their stars will burn out because of this.
And so this book is about reminders of ways to take care of ourselves as educators and also as human beings. Reminders like how getting enough sleep is an essential part of being an effective teacher as is pausing to take three deep breaths at various points throughout the day. It’s about giving ourselves permission to go for a five-minute walk during plan time; permission to conduct a walking meeting; permission to not be perfect. This will be a lot of re-learning. We know these things. We really do. But along our teaching journey, we might have chosen our students and our career over ourselves so many times that we’ve forgotten what it means to engage in radical self-care without guilt. It’s time to ditch the guilt and see if maybe, just maybe, we can become even more effective teachers when we put our own oxygen masks on before helping others.
Please join me in this conversation at: www.facebook.com/selfcareforeducators.
