Guts, Gottman, Ghosts

 This is the post for last Sunday. I'm busy. Teaching, especially when you are really trying to become a good teacher, requires a huge energy input and a lot of guts. Energy should be obvious, because kids are often exhausting when you're in charge of them. Guts because to improve you have to put yourself out there, take risks, do things that are uncomfortable, fail, humbly learn from your failures, rinse and repeat.

I will do it. I will learn, grow, and get good. And, there's a part of me that wants to help teachers like me: new, inexperienced and overwhelmed, looking for a viable pathway to become a big force for good in a lot of people's lives, but not sure how to get there. But first I need to be speaking from experience. There's a part of me that wonders if I will end up at least partly in the research side of things. I have a dream of doing, or being a part, bringing Gottman's approach to relationships, to teaching and teacher training. Only I'm not only or even primarily interested in academic growth, but im personal and character growth. I want good citizens, good people, coming out of our schools. Not just smart people. Good people. And happy people.

In any case, I think Gottman did a pretty good job of helping people do that with relationships, if they're willing to do the work. He has a nicely open, scientific approach to it, that feels less biased and more accurate than most relationship guru's advice. I want something like that for education, teacher training, and perhaps some of it can transfer down to parenting. Basically, there are plenty of people doing a really go job of this already, I just want to isolate out what the factors are that make them good teachers (or parents) and then refine a training method that will truly teach someone how to do these things, not in theory, but in reality, in actual practice. And probably the research will point to a lot of things that people are already doing well, and so my job would just be indicating what those things are and where gaps need to be filled.

In any case, I think that while teaching is extremely rewarding, I'm not using one of my biggest gifts : my love of research, and so I've got thoughts bubbling in the back of my brain, how to get the best of both worlds.

In any case, for now these are just daydreams, since I'll be doing what I'm currently doing for the next three years at least.

Also I'm maybe going to play the board game Mysterium with some friends via zoom, if we can figure out the logistics, this Halloween. I'll probably be the Ghost, which is a challenging but fun role. Hope you all have a good all hallows eve ;-)

Stay Safe, and pray for the election of a sane government.

-Isaac