I feel fragile and brittle and transparent, like the ridged yellowish-white seashells that are too ugly to collect while beachcombing; like my mother’s arthritic hands’ fingernails which she has deformed all her life by picking, picking at the cuticles.
I am searching for a job, or more accurately a new and sustainable career path, for my re-entry into the workforce next year. The things I am most skilled at doing, and have been doing my entire working life, all require that I receive feedback of some kind or another, and right now it is as if a megaphone has been attached to any perceived negative responses to my efforts, drowning out my ability to hear positives or maintain a balanced sense of self-integrity.
I can use my rational mind to invoke all that I know about diverse learning styles when I am doing professional development with teachers. I know that in that classroom of adults, just as in any classroom, there is a spectrum of needs and comfort levels. Some will want structure, while others will rebel against it. Some want more time to discuss with colleagues, some want more time to reflect privately about what they have experienced and how they might apply it, and some simply want the consultants to show them a strategy or two—a “trick” or a silver bullet—that they can use right away in their classrooms that will somehow fix what is not working for their low-achieving students. Some are willing to be polite to the consultant , others to be fully supportive since they are used to be playing the role of “good students” themselves, and others to be reluctant learners, hostile to outsiders, needing to feel as if they are smarter than anyone in the room—typical adolescent behavior from burned-out professionals.
I find it ironic that in a writing-based workshop, so many teachers themselves do not value the writing process. They either do not know about or do not benefit from “writing to learn”—exploring thoughts, ideas, and applications of the work we have done together—the demonstrations of teaching strategies, the small group and full group brainstorms and discussions– even though writing to learn is one of the fundamental ideas that I bring to them as a consultant: using writing as a tool for their students both to improve their writing and to improve their mastery of content. Teachers can also use writing-to-learn as a means of formative assessment to find out what students understand and can do and what they still need to practice. AND IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE GRADED! Teachers don’t even have to read every student’s writing: they can read 5 excerpts at random, or pick 5 of their lowest achieving students, or pick a representative range of students based on previous achievement, to see what they may need to modify in order to appropriately challenge each student, or at least to make sure that those students who are not yet competent can get the additional instruction and practice they need.
At one workshop, the very first thing I asked teachers to do was a free-write on whether we as educators wanted students to think of themselves as writers. I was astonished at the number of teachers who said, “No.” Do we want students to think of themselves as learners? How, then, do we want them to think of themselves in terms of their ability to express what they have learned? Writing is the most common way throughout their educational career that they will be asked to demonstrate what they know. And because so many of the students in public schools are not “all about the grade,” we need to show them other reasons why becoming effective writers is important, why writing is a lifetime skill, an important asset outside the world of high school (and college). Even for those students whose jobs or daily lives will not entail writing, we want them to know and be able to use writing as a tool for organizing their thoughts and communicating effectively with others when they need to. We also know that teaching students to be good writers in high school also teaches them higher-order thinking skills like analysis, interpretation, and critical reasoning that they need to use as consumers of information throughout their adult lives.
Another great irony is how many teachers are themselves uncomfortable with writing and lack confidence in their own ability to write. Our State Standards require that every educator be responsible for providing students with opportunities to learn how to read, write, use oral communication and reasoning skills effectively. Yet by high school—the level that I teach—we as educators are departmentalized and loaded down with content-heavy curriculum, and reading and writing skills are left to the prerogative of English (and sometimes Social Studies and upper level Foreign Language) teachers. Many teachers have commented in my workshops about how little they use writing in their own adult lives, even within school. Some teachers have challenged me when I require every session to begin with a free-write and end with time for reflective writing. That is not how they teach, and not how they experienced writing being used when they were students. How we can have meaningful discussions about authentic audience and real-world writing when we, the primary assigners of writing, have so little experience and opportunity to practice what we teach? No wonder so many of the college-prep students are still cranking out traditional essays with little personal investment, while the other students are not even being assigned much writing, let alone expected to meet the same standards of quality. Even as we bemoan our students’ lack of effective writing skills, we are not creating assignments that show them (and us) the relevance of writing to the larger world and to the student-authors themselves.
I know all of this with my rational head, but my bruised ego and sieve of an emotional filter is having a hard time coping right now with consulting—normally a job I love, in which I have been able to dismiss the negative participants as basically unhappy people who are bringing that kind of energy into the sessions regardless of me or what I do. I have been flung backward into a time that parallels my early teaching career, when every day ended full of self-doubt and frustration at the impossibility of “pleasing all of the people all of the time. “ I no longer expect to be able to do this—as I’ve said, I now understand a great deal more about diversity of learners in the classroom, as well as diversity of teachers—early adopters, resisters, and everyone in-between—in any school. But I am left with such exhaustion and feelings of failure after a session despite knowing this that I’m wondering whether this is a job I really want to do.
And then I think about all the other, non-teaching related jobs I might like to try: rock landscaping, an organic landscaping business with native species, shade gardens, and other specialty niches; a recycle reclamation business for building and home decorating materials that normally wind up in the landfill; a Fair Trade store; my historical walking tours business; teaching fitness classes to seniors; designing work-based wellness programs for businesses with employee-insurance plans. None of these are totally free of negative feedback. And if the major stumbling block for me is how thin my skin has gotten, and how much perfectionism has resurrected itself in my life over the past few months, then perhaps my marriage counselor is correct in saying that I need to commit to weekly sessions.
I groaned when he said this, protested, said: no more talk therapy—I’m already too self-reflective, too analytical. Our child/family therapist said something similar to me about my conflicted relationship with my oldest son: “You are constantly analyzing and analyzing him, aren’t you?” And I replied, “Yes, because I feel as if something is wrong there, and I want to figure out what it is, and fix it, and find a way to deal with it better than I am.” And, of course, because I recognize so much in him that I suffered as a child: the perfectionism, the difficulty with losing in competition, the unwillingness to do anything unless I was already the best without practice. I don’t want him to suffer in the same ways, and yet my own need to be a perfect mother has already helped to reinforce all sorts of tendencies in him that exacerbate his negative self-esteem, his fear of risk-taking, his acting out in the family—and perhaps most importantly, his marked preference for my non-judgemental husband over myself. I need to let go of the need to control and micromanage and analyze and understand everything—an illusion anyway, though one that helps me to feel safe if straitjacketed. It is damaging my relationships within my family and stultifying my ability to imagine my future; and it is impairing my job performance now, on the few consulting gigs that I have throughout this school year.
So yes, Irish, I will come back so that you can fix my broken self, even though I am angry at you for noticing how broken I am.
