As you may have noticed my post is a full week late. Why? Well, I squandered my time, that's why. I'm attempting not to beat myself up too much about it, but it is depressing. I need better willpower. My dear loving wife has said I've got some of the highest willpower of anyone she knows. It warms my heart to hear her belief in me, but I would call that skill at making habits and engineering my environment. I accept that I have decent skill in those things. But the reason I developed skill in those things was because I was sorely lacking in willpower, so I needed a different option. I do believe that good habit formation skills along with good environmental engineering are in general more useful than willpower, as you are relying on them 80-95% of the time, and it would be exceptionally unusual to have someone do that much stuff right every day, day after day, year after year if they had to make the willpower-fueled decision every day for each decision.
But when you are in novel circumstances, when something happens that you didn't plan for, when you slip up, it is willpower that lets you stay on track regardless. Both things are valuable, and I want more of the willpower one. I think it's also related to sense controle. Willpower, sense controle, discipline. I am weak in these. I want to get stronger. I'm working on it.
In other news, I had a quiet prayer/meditation session introspecting and trying to get some wisdom on my job (I mistyped that as "joy" which is very appropriate. "Follow your bliss" Joseph Campbell said, right?) and the fact that every Sunday night and every last few days of vacation, I spend dreading my return to work. That's not a good sign that you're "following your bliss." What's going on? Help!
The insight I had was that many of my methods of discipline and classroom management disgust me. I disliked being permissive, which was my native style, and which I knew intuitively and now experientially, was bad for the kids. Currently it is somewhat authoritarian, which involves harsh looks and words, punishments, and fear, when children aren't behaving appropriately. Don't get the wrong idea, I'm pretty gentle as far as things go, but I do the command voice, I move students, I have them sit out, etc. It is exhausting to do, and I think it's morally reprehensible. Not all of it, but even doing a facsimile of anger to get what I want... what the heck am I teaching them? Yes, yell to get what you want? Scare people? Punish them if they don't do what you want? I know they need to be corrected when they do something wrong, letting it go is just as bad, maybe worse, but I can't reconcile it with yelling at them.
I don't have a cohesive philosophy about it, so I'm copying behaviors that seem to work, using the least unpleasant. But it still doesn't feel good. If I stop, then it's chaos, it's even worse. But that doesn't make it good. Sometimes I use other methods that feel better, but they are very time intensive and individualized, and there often just isn't time for that when you're in charge of 40 kids. And often they don't even work, either because I haven't had time to learn how to do them properly, or because they're bupkis.
I need a way of creating a peaceful, hardworking, responsible classroom that doesn't make me exhausted and drained at the end of the day. That actually feels right and good. This is the crux of my discontent with my job. I am ambivalent towards teaching, which doesn't mean wishy-washy like it sounds like, but feeling strongly in more than one direction. I love working with the children, helping them grow, learn, get inspired. But I currently strongly dislike classroom management. Sometimes it's ok, sometimes it's neutral, but often it does not feel good to my heart.
The other crux being how long I work. It is too many hours watching children. There is nothing to be done about it now, but it's on my list for what not to do, next time I have the option of choosing. After a 9.5 hour work day being in charge of a large group of children, I am totally fried. I want time to plan, reflect, practice, grow. That should be part of what I'm getting paid for, not my weekend time. If I were working in a company, it would be part of my work hours. I think it is only because of necessity that it is not that way. Not enough money, not enough people. But it is not right to expect someone to teach even 8 hours a day straight and then go home and have to worry about more work stuff. Teaching is hard enough work as it is.
There is little I can do about the discipline, since I have little spare energy/time, but I have something I'm going to try, to see if I can at least be putting a few minutes a day towards improving my classroom management skills in a deliberate way, since it's so central to whether I enjoy my work.
Can't do much about the discipline, can't do anything about the hours, so for now my main strategy is "endure."
-I Out
No comments:
Post a Comment