City teaching is fear-inducing. How can we protect ourselves and our students?
In my last post, I discussed my long journey to become more like my mentors in education, who all seem to subscribe to the ethos of leading with love despite all odds.
I also described how much I struggled, as an ex-cynic, ex-journalist, and ex-marketer, to embrace slogans of positivity like this, especially ones that seem to oversimplify the obviously difficult or invite us to ignore the obviously broken.
The truth is, some clichés exist for a reason, and “lead with love” is one of them. Through meditating on my practice as an educator, I have come to understand that in lesson planning, when my love for information is combined with a heady mix of unconscious fears, the result cannot properly be called a “process” or even really planning: it is paranoia. (We’ve all been there: “What if the students don’t get it? What if Student X can’t handle that level of freedom and responsibility? What if we give them choice–and they make the wrong choices? What if, what if, what if…”)
Only when combining my careful habits of research with love–with the presumption of positive intent and the expansive mentality of possibility for my students–do my best plans emerge.
However, this is easier said than done. Fear is a part of all of us, especially those of us who work in urban settings rife with worrying stimuli. I’ve sometimes described living, commuting and working in NYC schools as moving from one box of chaos to another, inside a bigger box of chaos. While living here, I’ve been the victim of hit and run accidents perpetrated by teenagers high on drugs, threatened and cat-called on the subway more times than I can count, and on a smaller scale, tormented daily by the never-ending presence of dog-choking chicken bones on my street. Our fight-or-flight systems as New Yorkers are always on high alert.
Of course, fear is not unique to New Yorkers. It’s also endemic to American childhood. Mine was certainly full of it. Fear of rejection. Fear of hunger. Fear of punishment. In a culture where weakness is frowned upon, we learn to hide our fear inside of our bodies. On the subways, we stand with heads bowed, shoulders dipped in, protecting our hearts and our soft bellies; this is a learned response, and a rational one in a country where it’s rarely okay to cry.
On the street, I can always duck around the corner if I don’t like the way someone’s looking at me, but since it would look a little funny if I ran from my classroom every time I felt uncomfortable, “fight” is often my default response to fear. Yet when teachers and students engage in fear-triggered conflict, even if this is a rational response to the stimuli that is all around us, everyone loses.
So how can we train our minds, as urban teachers, to de-escalate the situation for our students, even as we all feel fear?
One solution is to try to access fear through mindfulness and meditation, if we have the wherewithal to do so. When I realize I am engaging in fear-full actions as an educator–reacting too strongly because a student has startled me, cutting my curriculum off at the knees because I’m struggling to trust my students to handle risk–I try to remember the words of Parker Palmer, from his seminal Courage to Teach. Parker, who is a veteran teacher, admits that his need for control has resulted in the most “amateurish” moments of his long career, and shares the ways in which his daily practices of self-care, particularly meditation, have actually helped him to develop better structures for eliciting his student’s best performances. When you are “standing in fear,” living and teaching from that impoverished place, Parker advises, you must learn to feel the fear, while also deciding to “stand somewhere else.” The somewhere else, obviously, is in a more expansive and open state of mind, one where trust is possible and risks feel exciting again.
However, it can be hard, sometimes, to even notice the fear we feel. We’ve spent much of our lives attempting to hide it from each other. So I have also begun to try to “stand somewhere else” in my physical body, by recommitting myself to a daily morning yoga and meditation practice in order to re-set my mind during the time of day when it is most affected by the stress hormone cortisol. (In my last post, I noted that I am currently engaged in a training for Breathe for Change, which certifies classroom teachers as yoga instructors while providing them with socio-emotional training and support; among other things, it has required me to read Palmer’s book and do yoga three times a week.)
Engaging in “heart-opening” or “hip-opening” poses, I am often astonished at how much fear and anger is released when I bare these vulnerable parts of my body. Yet by doing so in the safe space of a studio, I can train my body in the knowledge that it will survive this exposure. Starting to dismantle fear in the body in the safety of a yoga practice, rather than trying to wrestle with my fearful mind in a stressful school setting, also allows the older fears that are locked inside the body (and all too often, running the show in the subconscious mind) to make themselves known, felt, and ultimately, accepted.
Through my attempts to stretch my heart along with my hamstrings each morning, I have gradually come to see that my previous fear-based “mantras” (lead with toughness! make it perfect!) have been leading me straight into a prison of my own making, not towards any safe space. Sitting or standing rigidly in a pose that is too difficult, or allowing one’s body to collapse inward in a stance of protecting the heart during meditation, does not facilitate mindfulness. I have learned that standing or sitting in a place of “spaciousness” instead, throwing your shoulders are wide open and exposing your heart, is what strengthens each pose and allows the breath to come easy, even if it feels very difficult to do emotionally.
I have already started to notice the differences that these mind-body practices are having on my work. Before I began my year of “leading with love,” I was stubbornly repeating my mantras of strength and inviolability all day long instead, not allowing these inner aching voices to be heard or comforted–and sometimes, not allowing my critical and paranoid fears to be confronted when they were blocking opportunities for me to embrace spaciousness. No wonder these messages of fear leaked into my teaching, resulting in negative feedback from my students. Because they, too, are New Yorkers who are always afraid. They don’t need me to escalate their situation through my own reactivity–they need me to provide a safe space for them to do the same work of dismantling their fears.
Now, I’m finding that my thoughts have started to shift–from “How can I get them to listen to me?” to “How can I create a space for them to be able to listen to themselves?”
