The hardest thing I have ever done is to teach high school for one semester. In the grand scheme of things, I realize how ridiculously lucky this makes me. But I have to admit it’s true; I’ve never struggled or suffered so much as I did in that endless five month stretch in the classroom.
Within a week, I was completely overwhelmed, frantic all the time, and so stressed and exhausted trying to get through each day and prepare for the next that I had no chance to process what was going on.
I started out knowing that teaching would be an intense and difficult job, but I felt I was up for the challenge. Within a week, I was completely overwhelmed, frantic all the time, and so stressed and exhausted trying to get through each day and prepare for the next that I had no chance to process what was going on. It was like someone pulled the rug out from underneath me, and I couldn’t get back up.
When my contract finally ended and the teacher I’d been covering for returned from maternity leave, I felt the greatest relief of my life. But the experience had really knocked me off balance. It had shaken my sense of self at a deep level, and I knew that I needed to spend some time trying to understand what that was about.
… it helped me to separate the internal causes of my struggle from the external, to take these causes seriously, and to get some sense of how to work with them.
Right around this time, I began a class on the Buddhist Unconscious at DRBU. It didn’t occur to me that the class would have any direct connection to my teaching experience. But it did — it helped me to separate the internal causes of my struggle from the external, to take these causes seriously, and to get some sense of how to work with them.
I’m not saying that the external circumstances don’t matter. Teaching high school effectively is a massive, taxing job, especially in the first few years, and anyone who says otherwise has probably never tried it. Tenth grade World History is not the easiest place to start – you have to cover a huge amount of ground, and most 15-year-olds are not noted for their hunger to understand medieval feudalism, or for their compassion towards inexperienced teachers. I was in a difficult, overwhelming situation – but as I later realized, my own state of mind had made it even harder. I wasn’t going to single-handedly reform the public education system, but maybe I could reform my own perspective.
In Buddhism, the source of all suffering is attachment to our desires. Desire is not just about wanting something from the outside world; it also extends into our individual psychology. We want to see ourselves in a certain way, and we become attached to particular views of ourselves. When we don’t look closely into where our sense of identity comes from, and what it’s attached to or dependent on, we can develop blind spots. In the case of my teaching experience, I began to see that what felt like a natural, well-intended desire to help my students contained hidden elements that had caused me some major suffering.
The book we read in class, The Buddhist Unconscious, by William Waldron, gives a very detailed analysis of how all our conscious perceptions and ideas are rooted in unconscious habits of mind. When I was teaching, I was consciously aware that I wanted to do well at it – and that seemed like a good thing. What I didn’t realize was just how much my overall sense of identity was attached to my success as a teacher, or how counterproductive this was. I had a lot of pride and ego caught up in teaching; I was taking it very seriously, and in a certain sense, it was very much about me, even if I was spending all my free time planning lessons and grading papers. This meant that when things started to go wrong, I was very hard on myself. I couldn’t believe I would fall so short of my own expectations. I felt disconnected from the person I thought I was, no longer confident in my ability to judge situations and make good decisions.
My internal state of mind had direct, tangible effects on my daily experience in the classroom, and vice versa. I was waking up every morning feeling exhausted, anxious, and defeated, and then trying to boss around a bunch of highly skeptical teenagers for six hours. The students sensed my insecurity and frustration and let me know, in no uncertain terms, that they saw right through me. (Teenagers are good at this.) I reacted to their boredom and contempt, and they reacted to my reaction, and we became locked in a downward spiral.
It would be nice if I never again had to scrub desks of profanities directed toward “Ms Gross” at the end of a long day. But at this point, I can appreciate how the intensity of teaching forced me to look at some things that would have gotten in my way sooner or later. The world is filled with people who want to roll their eyes and call us names. When we’re unsure of ourselves, we’re much more liable to start believing them.
Just getting a glimpse of these attachments, they became less powerful than when I was blind to them completely.
We can’t fake self-understanding, and the more intensely we’re engaging with other people, the more quickly our blind spots will catch up with us. We have to work on knowing ourselves as we actually are at every moment, not simply as we would like to be. In my case, I realized I needed to let go of certain aspects of my desire to teach or to help in order to actually do these things effectively. Just getting a glimpse of these attachments, they became less powerful than when I was blind to them completely. Since then, the trick has been to keep paying attention – to keep noticing ego and pride when they arise, and how they cause me to react, internally and externally.
In order to keep watching for these sides of myself — sides that are inherently uncomfortable or unwanted — I can’t let my ego creep back in and start clouding things again. I have to be willing to accept my imperfections without getting judgmental. I have to silence the harsh internal critic, stop agonizing over past mistakes, and appreciate the fact that I’m making an effort to learn something. From here, it’s easier to watch uncomfortable attachments arise without freaking out, and then wait for them to pass away. To keep up the courage it takes to look at ourselves honestly, we have to be nice to ourselves. Not only does it feel better, it’s the only way to get anywhere.