Teaching – Half-Blood Kuwaiti

I Finally Attend Kindergarten

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I never went to kindergarten as a child. My mother believed that was just too young an age for me to be without her, so she homeschooled me instead and sent me off into the world when I was six. So logically, I quit my high-paying, perfectly acceptable job teaching high school for one in an educational setting I have zero experience in for a much lower salary. Did I mention that I’ve been scared of children ever since my cousin used to hit me as a toddler?

So far it’s actually been a great choice—children seem to like me, I’m no longer wistfully contemplating suicide, and it’s much more rewarding overall. There’s nothing like getting a hug from a four-year-old.

Or being punched in the stomach by one. One child I’ve had the privilege of dealing with announced on our first day together that he does not like teachers. He only likes mommy. The next day he decided he liked me and wanted to go home with me, only to dislike me again a little while later. It was weirdly reminiscent of my interactions with adult men.

Since then, he has alternately loved me and hated me depending on my willingness to let him do whatever he wants. I refused him a certain box of toys once, and as a result he kicked me, hit me, tried to bite me, threw something at my head, and chased me with a pair of scissors while saying, “I CUT YOU!”…Twice.

But for some reason I forget all of that when he runs up to me in the hall, says, “I like you,” and wraps his arms around my leg.

One thing I won’t forget, however, is the five-year-old who identified a picture of a dog as “a bitch”. I don’t know who taught him that and I don’t want to know, but nothing I ever heard in high school left me that speechless.

I hope this is one job I can stand without losing my sanity, which is worth the thinly veiled disappointment of my relatives. And somehow I think it might be, because there’s something really nice about hearing kids tell you that their mother is very fat and the teacher uses her phone when you aren’t in the room. It might even be worth getting sneezed on, drooled on, and physically assaulted. As long as no one pees on me, because that I am not okay with.

Is Depressed the New Normal?

I know everyone likes to believe that the newest generation is worse than all the previous ones, or that the world is in constant decline or possibly about to end. Complaining about “people these days” is the least original complaint in history–even though most statistics show that it isn’t based on fact. When it comes to vaccinations, health, and poverty, life is actually getting much better.

But—and it’s a very important but—this does not hold true for mental illness. We may have better treatment methods, but cases of anxiety and depression have been steadily on the rise since the 1930s. Suicide rates are down, but this is most probably because of the invention of antidepressants, not because fewer people are suffering in the first place. Seventy years ago we did not have the epidemics of eating disorders and self-harm that we do now, and that isn’t nostalgia speaking–it’s simply the truth.

Why is this so? My belief is that modern life is in conflict with our physiology, destining us for emotional issues. We were not made for the way we live. And so, our mental health is paying the price. Think about this: Two natural ways to fight depression are through exercise, because it releases endorphins, or through sun exposure, because vitamin D deficiency is a cause of depression. But how many of us work in jobs that require us to be physically active? How many of us spend significant time outdoors each day? As the world changes, it pushes us more and more inside buildings and into artificial light. This is not how we were meant to live.

In addition, modern life encourages us to be sedentary consumers, not because it’s best for us but because businesses profit when we do less of what fulfills us and spend money instead. Look at the messages you’re bombarded with on a daily basis. What do advertisements suggest you do to become happy? Yes, you can ignore advertisements–most of us don’t buy everything advertised to us. But marketing works on the principle that you need to feel there is something lacking in your life that the product can fix. In other words, we face an onslaught of images and messages designed to make us feel like we aren’t good enough whenever we turn on the TV, look at our iPhone, or even go outside. We don’t have to buy something for that idea to be internalized.

But the biggest change in the last century that contributes to increased mental health problems has got to be school. School has changed, and there are interesting historical reasons why. In the first half of the 20th century, homework was frowned upon and given rarely–until the Space Race and the Cold War. The American desire to compete with the Russians manifested in a more rigorous education system. From then on, the more challenging, the better, we said. Now, standardized testing cripples students with a fear of failure.

But all of this pressure is artificial. Is there anything inherent in learning that specifies we should be dealing with constant anxiety? It isn’t like we are learning to become soldiers or warriors. There is absolutely no reason why reading a book and reflecting on it should make you nervous. We learn in our everyday lives, and it doesn’t fill us with panic. Imagine someone trying to make a new recipe or play a new video game having an anxiety attack when they made a mistake. We would think this was highly abnormal. But we accept it in an academic culture–students cry over tests, have panic attacks in the bathroom, and we aren’t even surprised. If anything, the calm student is the exception, and their peers look at them with wonder but also think they ought to care more. We have accepted that school should trigger your fight-or-flight danger response even though there is no real danger.

This soul-crushing system has been put in place because we want an easy way to figure out if someone is good enough to be in our college or our company. It’s too difficult to figure out someone’s skills on our own; we need numbers and data we can analyze quickly. It makes sense to some extent, but we have taken it to the extreme. And this increases the pressure placed on us: as more people have degrees, the less meaning they have in the world, and the more we are expected to be able to do in addition to having succeeded academically. The world needs creative people right now, people with talents, and school doesn’t teach you to be talented. Schools are not designed to optimize individual student learning. They are designed to optimize financial resources and put numbers on qualities that can’t be defined in numbers.

And yet we call the reaction to this mental illness. “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” said Jiddu Krishnamurti. And I agree. Life has always been hard, but we have made it unnecessarily difficult in a way we are not naturally equipped to deal with. People complain that the uptick in mental illness is due to over-diagnosis of normal human emotions. I agree and disagree, because these emotions are normal reactions, but they shouldn’t be existing to this extent. But how else are we supposed to react in an environment that harms and sickens us? The problem is that we are considered the problem, that we treat the sufferers instead of addressing what they are suffering from.

Are you and I sick? This is what I’ve been told. But I disagree: If I am ill, it is only because I live in a diseased world. It is only because everything around us is fighting to make us ill, and no one is trying to stop it.

5 Things No One Tells You About Choosing a Career

Adults constantly lie to children, and never more so than when they talk about careers. We look to the future wild optimism, believing that the hard part is deciding what we want to be when grow up and not the reality check that comes after it. Many of us, if we could go back in time, would give a few words of advice to our younger selves. These would be mine.

You don’t just need to look at what you’re good at, but also what you’re bad at.

When we think about the future, we naturally minimize obstacles. “I’m not a morning person, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it!” we say, or “This job will actually help me overcome my fear of children!” “Sure, I’m not very organized, but I’ll learn to deal with that.”

People are very resistant to change. In many ways (too many ways), I’m very much the same person I was when I was six years old. We also underestimate human variance. What many people are good at naturally we might assume is easy for everyone. It doesn’t work that way. I know doctors who can’t tell time—teachers who are great with children but struggle with addition.

Sometimes we think that because a job isn’t that “hard” it won’t be difficult for us personally, and this is also misguided. You don’t need to go to college to be a waitress, but that doesn’t make it easy. Many jobs are challenging not for the knowledge they require but for the skills, like communicating, organizing, planning, etc.

You can develop as a person, but you can’t change into someone else, and if you have a weakness now you should assume it will be there for the rest of your life. You can find ways to minimize its effect, but you’re always going to be dealing with it. So seriously consider the parts of your personality that can make certain jobs hard for you:

Are you a morning person?
How do you feel about rules and deadlines?
Are you punctual?
How much human interaction can you stand?
Do you hate either sitting or standing?
Do you have a quick temper?
Do strangers scare you as much as they scare me?

2. Job satisfaction depends on much more than being in the right field.

Even if you’ve found what you’re meant to do, the details of a specific job are very important. For example, will you have an office with a door you can shut? This can make a big difference for an introvert. Also pay attention to your commute. You might as well calculate it as part of your working hours, especially if you’re driving. Technically I work from 7-2:45, but when you throw in transportation, it ends up being more like 6:15-3:45. This is nine and a half hours. See if your pay is worth that before you accept.

If you’re a highly sensitive person, take your stressors seriously. Avoid noisy work environments and make sure your dress code allows you to be comfortable. Even something that sounds as minor as being required to wear high heels can take a toll on you physically and emotionally.

3. “I like to help people” is unhelpful.

Most of us will say that we enjoy being of service to others, that making a difference in the community is the key to a rewarding job. This is useless information. A much better question to ask is how you enjoy helping people.

You can help people by changing their babies’ diapers or by removing their brain tumors. Pretty much every job is designed to help other people because otherwise no one would pay for it.

I realized recently that I don’t feel as if I’m contributing to the world unless what I’m doing is somehow unique. If it doesn’t rely heavily on my own insights, creativity, and ideas, it doesn’t hold much meaning for me. For example, as much as teaching is supposed to be rewarding, I know that many people can do exactly the same thing I’m doing. Students don’t need me to tell them about this or that grammar lesson because I’m the only who knows about it. It provides a service to the world, but it isn’t changing anything. If I were stuck teaching children their ABCs everyday, I would feel completely useless, unless I was the one who had invented the alphabet.

I’m not alone in this feeling, so consider carefully not whether you want to benefit others but how you want to do it. It could be emotional or physical, a unique contribution or a standard service. But it makes a big difference in terms of your job satisfaction.

4. You can be a good student and a terrible employee.

Maybe at one point in time school was teaching you marketable skills, but I think that time has passed. It’s pretty easy to get by in school on your natural intelligence, something valued surprisingly little in many jobs. Teachers average your overall performance. Employers do not.

If, for example, you have an A average but skip several homework assignments, you’ll end up with something like a B. Not bad. If you approach your job the same way, you will end up not having a job.

Conversely, although you won’t learn enough in school to be prepared for your first job, you will still have to go to learn some of what you need to even be considered for a job. In general, though, you will learn much more by doing than by being taught. So you’re better off spending your teenage years learning how to design a website or use PhotoShop than expecting your teachers to prepare you for life.

5. Your job matters because it will consume much of your waking life.

I used to think that a job was important for a steady income but that I wouldn’t get paid regularly to do what I actually care about. So, I could be like, a doctor, and write books on the side! I actually believed this was possible at some point.

Most jobs will wear you out by the end of the day. You’ll be too tired to do much of anything afterwards. I come home wishing I had a stay-at-home wife who would have dinner waiting for me. I have no idea how people with children manage.

Your job matters because it will consume most of your energy, and if it’s not what you love, you will end up spending a lot less time on what you actually care about. Maybe that’s fine if you don’t have some other passion you wish to pursue, but if you do, the time spent at the steady job you take to pay the bills is time lost.

I have a lot of respect and admiration for people who choose to sacrifice a higher paycheck for a job centered around their goals. They’re paying money for a good life, and that’s a whole lot better than paying for money with your happiness. Whenever I figure out how to do the same thing, I will definitely let you know.

Reflections on My First Two Years as a Teacher, Part 3

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Here it is: the third and final installment in this series. I would write more but I’ve started my third year of teaching, and if I blog about my students and employers while I work there, I may get fired.Which I don’t want, since everything is going great. Except for the day when I got confused about when school started and showed up almost an hour late, which wasn’t my fault, although for some reason it didn’t happen to anyone else in the entire school. Not even the person I told to come at wrong time. There have been days in the past two years when I have felt unemployable, and that was one of them.

My new school is a big change, primarily because it does not measure success in staff and student tears. So far no one wants me to suffer, and no one wants me to quit. It makes me uncomfortable. I feel like they don’t know what I’m like yet, and when they figure it out, they too will seek to squash me like a bug.

But I’m trying not to let that happen. For example, apparently they can’t stand it when teachers come late. Late is my middle name. “Issues with time” is one of the top three personality traits that make me who I am. But I haven’t come late once in the past two weeks, except for the day I got confused, and while that doesn’t sound like an accomplishment, it is for me (yes, I am that bad).

Something I’m happy about, though, is the lack of discipline problems I’ll have to deal with. I told another teacher about Fire Boy from my last school, and she was horrified. “The biggest issue I’ve had to deal with was a couple years ago when a student spilled mouthwash in class,” she said.

Excuse me? I didn’t show how confused I was because I didn’t want to seem like the unqualified teacher who doesn’t get what’s wrong with mouthwash, but I did not see the problem. Was she throwing the mouthwash at someone? Was she drinking it for the alcohol content? If clumsiness is a discipline issue, I’ll end up sending myself to the principal. Also, I don’t think that teacher appreciates how lucky she is to have students hygienic enough to carry mouthwash with them to school. Fire Boy probably would have found a way to turn it into an explosive.

I truly don’t have much else to say on this topic right now, almost as if I have come to peace with the last two years. That can’t be entirely true because I recently dreamed I took my boy’s class to a hospital and they trampled a disabled child, but I think I’m getting there. I feel like I’m already a better teacher than I was two weeks ago, and it makes me sad that I couldn’t be as good with my last students. I’m also sad because I miss them. You spend a year trying to get through to a group of people, and if you put your heart into your work, the sense of loss is inevitable. The teacher’s curse is caring about their students even when the students do not care about them.

On a lighter note, we had a professional development lecturer come and, since he was a math teacher, he used math problems in his examples. I left feeling great about myself since I know that 16 X 5 is not 400. I used to think this was a joke:

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It’s not. It’s definitely not. That’s all I’m going to say.

Reflections on My First 2 Years as a Teacher

One of the first things that surprised me when I began teaching was how absolutely exhausting it was. I’d never experienced such exhaustion in my life. Other teachers told me I would adapt, which I did, and to improve my diet, which I didn’t.

Then, my tiredness was replaced by difficulty sleeping due to anxiety and nightmares about my colleagues. Now I no longer worry about teaching depleting my energy since I discovered I never had any in the first place. I’m on summer vacation and I’m still tired, and believe me, I’m not doing anything. Since I have a new job coming up and I am hoping it will be much better than the last one, I should probably get myself checked for the anemia people keep telling me I must have.

My last job. Where do I begin? It was my first job and my introduction to teaching. It also destroyed my self-esteem. But I learned a lot from it.

On a positive note, I learned that teachers really love their students. I never knew I would care about my students the way that I do. I certainly never cared that much about any of my teachers when I was in school. I can’t say I’m not flooded with joy because I never have to deal with a certain difficult class of mine again, but I have a soft spot even for some of my most irritating students. I cherish memories I have with all my classes, even if I don’t want to/probably couldn’t live through them again (but that is a post for another day). Students are truly the best part of teaching. I wonder if they know how much even the smallest nice thing they say or do means to me.

The worst part of teaching—and this was a surprise to me—is other teachers. Is there something about the profession that attracts the mentally unwell? Are many teachers not actually caring adults but individuals so insecure they get satisfaction from having power over children? I’ve met many great teachers, teachers that are organized, professional, disciplined, and respected by their students, and I’m in awe of them because I am none of those things. But then there are the others. I have never met a teacher who didn’t think they were great at their job, which is odd, because I certainly didn’t have many good teachers growing up. In fact, I barely remember most of them. They can’t all be good. But they are quick to defend themselves against any criticism and even quicker to give it out. Is the subject matter we teach our students really more important than teaching them to be kind, humble, and above all, self-aware? We are supposed to be an example, but some teachers are worse bullies and gossips than most of the students. It’s very sad. I don’t think many students know just how messed up things are behind the scenes. But it shows in the end, because a school can’t really be any better than its teachers.

I guess this kind of behavior comes from insecurity, which puzzles me a bit. Where are the teachers who manifest their insecurity like I do, in a raging case of imposter syndrome and by hiding from people who scare them in empty classrooms and under desks? Maybe arrogance is a better coping mechanism for low self esteem when you have to tell teenagers what to do for a living. It’s exhausting to be unsure of yourself/convinced you don’t know what you’re doing and be hoping your students don’t notice. Especially because they do notice. However much they can seem like blockheads, they are good at reading their teachers (if not much else). This became very clear to me once when a student asked me if I was an adult. Much like wild animals, students can smell fear.

Ironically, when I was a teenager and participating in school activities like bake sales, the children thought I was a teacher and said they were scared of me. Now I actually am a teacher, and no one is scared of me.

I am proud, however, that I have gone two years without crying in class, thereby proving my brother’s predictions wrong. I have almost cried in class multiple times, and cried in front of other teachers and school administrators, but not in front of students. This is partly due to not having lost all of my pride and self-respect (yet), and partly due to not wanting them to laugh at me. But whatever, I still haven’t done it.

Part two of my reflections on my first two years of teaching will be coming soon because I still have a lot more to say about it, and writing about it is cheaper than the therapy I desperately need.