When the walls come tumbling down
‘Unconditional Positive Regard is an attitude of grace, an attitude that values us even knowing our failings.’ – David G. Myers
This is a hard post to write. The only other times I have written these kind of blog posts I’ve written upbeat, light hearted and cheerful reflections on my first year of teaching; the funny and inspiring insights I’ve gained from the kids I teach; and the surprising and joyful ways I have been able to form connections with students in my classroom.
This won’t be one of those posts. Why? Because I broke one of the golden rules of teaching. And as much as I was so scared to, I think I need to talk about it.
My name is Hannah. The other week, I wasn’t the super bubbly, optimistic, engaged and compassionate teacher that I try to be every day at school. I wasn’t the resilient, humble, respectful, empathic ideal of the competencies we are meant to embody as TFA Associates. I wasn’t even a nice person. I was tired. I was stressed. I was lazy. I was distracted. I took my personal life to work and couldn’t shake it off- couldn’t divorce my students from their behaviour, couldn’t divorce their behaviour from my feelings, couldn’t divorce my feelings from my actions. I got angry at some students who weren’t listening to me when I was trying to facilitate a class test. And not in the, ‘Here are the class expectations we agreed on, here is where you are not meeting our agreed upon expectations’ way that we are taught to behaviour manage. I mean angry in the like, ‘I am personally hurt and offended you guys were interrupting me! Were you deliberately doing this to upset me? I feel like I give you so much care and respect and opportunities and you don’t treat me in the same way at all!” kind of way. In the way you would be angry at a friend or a sibling who upset you, not a couple of 14 year old kids who were just chatting because they were nervous about the test or didn’t know how to answer some of the questions. I took my student’s behaviour personally, let them personally hurt me and then let them know what they had done, all because I was having a bad few days, was feeling vulnerable and let down my emotional wall.
Later that day, one of my students asked me if I was tired. I looked at him and sighed deeply- ‘Yes, I am. I am very tired.’ My student looked up at me with the most touching mixture of compassion and concern. ‘Well Miss, please try to get a good sleep tonight, so you can go back to being happy tomorrow’.
My 14 year old student has more unconditional positive regard than I do. I nearly cried.
Hopefully, most of you reading this will have never had an experience like this before, and hopefully you never will. But for those of you who have ever let the professional become personal; who have felt guilty for being angry at a student or a class; who have thought about saying something to a student you shouldn’t have; who have let yourself be personally hurt by a teenage child and felt like you don’t deserve to be a teacher- I am writing this for you. I felt guilty about what happened in that lesson for a long time, disappointed in myself and feeling like I had let down all the people who believed that I could be a good teacher. I didn’t even want to tell anyone about what happened because I was scared of showing people that I’m nowhere near as breezy and put together as I try so hard to be.
But when I finally worked up the courage to talk to one of my best friends about my day, I was given one of the most comforting and heartening pieces of advice I have ever received- that you must never forget UPR isn’t just for your students, it’s for you too. She was so right. We have to forgive ourselves. As a first year teacher, and I can imagine even as a 10 or 20 year teacher, we are all human after all, and we have committed our lives to a profession that is, to put it simply, really hard. It is a profession that asks us to give our love and care and energy, every day, to 80 young humans. It is a profession that asks us to forgive these young humans their faults and to try our very best to help prepare them for the rest of their lives. I genuinely believe teaching to be one of the most incredible professions I have ever had the privilege to serve in, and I am so lucky to have been given the opportunity to help improve people’s lives. But at the same time, it took some much needed UPR from one of my students and my best friend to remind me that I need to save some love for myself.
We all make mistakes. It’s okay. If you have a bad day, get back in the classroom the next day and show your students you care. They are remarkably forgiving. But we just have to remember to forgive ourselves too.
