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To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time for every purpose, under heaven… 1
– Turn, Turn, Turn by The Byrds
By Cindy Reitzi
It’s official. I’m “old.” I turned 50 in April and got my first AARP application in the mail. Still, aside from less poundage and more flexibility, I wouldn’t want to be young again. Ironically, as an older person, I’m a better beginner than I used to be.
I don’t miss the prancing, mentally draining dance of youth.
I once asked a science teacher why we feel so exhausted just lying in the sun on a hot day, not exerting ourselves. Turns out, the sun’s heat tries to evaporate the water in our cells, while our cell walls, in turn, try to hold the center so we don’t dehydrate. The cellular struggle tires us.
As a young person, I often felt exhausted from a struggle not to “dehydrate” my core identity. A line from Yeats stuck in my head, “…things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” I felt a constant need to justify my existence, and I spent so much effort trying to “hold” my center that it siphoned off energy better spent in the external world. Yet, it was part of that essential “Sturm und Drang”2 of youth: define yourself or be defined by others.
As a good student in a classroom crowd, it’s easy to stay in one’s comfort zone; play it safe, get good grades. But as a teacher, the intensity of the teaching-learning relationship forces a confrontation to examine personal parts of your self – the good, bad, ugly, strong, weak. You’re “on stage” in more ways than just at the front of the classroom. All your hypocrisies are happily laid bare by students.
Teaching was a gift, but a hard gift I almost didn’t forgive. After a disastrous student teaching experience, I couldn’t step into a classroom for two years.
I grew up with immigrant parents who were refugees from WWII, the hard-scrabble, “Greatest Generation.” My father especially had a grim “life-is-one-long-protracted-struggle” work ethic philosophy. (But later… he acknowledged the gift of grandchildren and the joy they gave him.)
It took awhile to establish a teacher personality that melded comfortably with my everyday personality, something I didn’t just don for work. As a young teacher, after some wretched reviews from students devastated me, I realized I was too earnest, too hard, too unforgiving of myself and alternately, in my expectations of my students. Was I doing more harm than good? I wondered. My perfectionism and my fear of evaluation paralyzed me; in turn, I hated grading (and still do) because of the fears that bubbled up in me. I let others define me as a teacher and as a person, and I could not reconcile the two roles.
To be a perfectionist and teach is a wrenching experience. Perfectionism should not be confused with excellence or high standards. To learn, to innovate as a teacher, is to make mistakes.
As an adult, my cure was art therapy: taking ungraded art classes to give myself permission to make mistakes and even celebrate my mistakes outside of a work setting. In a jewelry class, when molten metal splashed out of the crucible and ruined the piece I was trying to cast, I looked at the metal, liked the shape and planned to make a pin out of it.
The next time I taught, I determined to give myself a gift: I vowed to enjoy my students, relax more, and bring more of my humor into the classroom. That year, I really defined myself as a teacher and I found a joy in teaching I hadn’t experienced before.
Geoff Hermann, a perceptive art teacher, once said, “Wisdom is a good trade-off for youth.” The gift of teaching is to venture past comfort zones in learning something new, fearless of looking foolish; to joy in being an expert beginner with each new class.
The gift of age is not living in fear. The gift of age is that the center does hold.
1 Words adapted from the Bible, Ecclesiastes 3: 1-9
2 German for ‘storm and stress’
Posted June 5, 2008