Dear colleague,
Brene Brown has this line that I love, and I heard it in a talk so what follows is perhaps a paraphrase: “There are two kinds of people in the world: crazy people who know they are crazy and crazy people who do not.” To Brown, what makes a person sane is grappling with their insanity; it's the ignoring of insanity, the pretending it's not there, that makes our mental imbalances unlivable.
Having made those prefatory remarks, here's the point I want to make. When you and me get all stressed out and crazy about this teaching job of ours, we're less of a teacher than when we're calm and sane.
Crazy us is an inferior teacher to sane us.
And when I say crazy, I'm talking about us when we're drowning in the Workload-Pressure Vortex — overloaded in work, overloaded in pressure. AKA, when we're teaching in late February.
This isn't just a personal problem; it's a professional one. When we get into this place of WAY TOO MUCH PRESSURE, we end up on the wrong side of the Yerkes-Dodson curve.
When I'm over-pressured and overworked — when my yoke is heavy and burdensome — I get hit by the rough and rude double whammy.
- My performance declines.
- My life enjoyment declines, too.
Whenever I find myself going nuts about teaching, the solutions are rarely easy. They often require not just changes in my strategy (e.g., what would this look like if it were simple? What do I need to satisfice? Where do I need to give myself permission to let go?), but lots of inner work, too (e.g., What is my class all about? Why am I a teacher? What is the good I am seeking to do through my labor — and if I never fully see the fruit of that work, can I be okay with that?)
So, not easy stuff at all. But things like the Yerkes-Dodson Curve or sayings like, “Crazy me is a worse teacher than sane me” — those things help remind me to attack not just my to-do list but also the work beneath the work.
My goal in teaching isn't to be the best teacher and definitely not to be a perfect one. It's to be a good teacher. This is an ongoing journey that teaching reliably calls me into, and my life and soul are better for having done this kind of work for twenty years.
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
PS If you'd like to explore reducing your workload via focus and simplification, check out These 6 Things: How to Focus Our Teaching on the Work that Matters Most.
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