On Teaching our Children, and Our children teaching, and heroes, villains, and the adventure somewhere round here

I realized something this Summer, well after the fires of the semester had died down. Something about the process of teaching, and the community which has been erected around responsibly engaging our students, our children, and their learning, so called.

I realized that our many heroes, mentors, and strivers in classroom spaces do a remarkable job of being with students. They, we, often give our all to advocate for a fully realized space fit to house and grow a healthy generation of thinkers and learners. This, the entire pursuit, is commendable, thankless work. It is essential, and critical. It is also a bit of a safe haven, truly.

By that I mean that I struggled in July and August, readying for the semester to return, feeling unsettled, agitated, restless. i thought back on the entire year, and now last semester of this year, and examined how well I was seeing my students, all students. I had spent countless hours ensuring that I was crafting spaces fit for my student classmates, but I had done far less work on Seeing my students. I had not examined how my internal, cognitive and emotional lenses were viewing my classmates, and our process, and the institution that serves as our dojo, and my beliefs about my purpose.

I learned, quietly, angrily, that altruism will never be enough of a fuel to fend off burnout for those in the craft. We will all have to require of ourselves, and others, that we are affirmed. We must find and meditate on victories, personal ones. We will have to meditate and ruminate on our purpose and what it means beyond words. We will have to consider whether being a hero of one sort or another is enough.

I realized, over this most recent break, that I don’t want to leave students with the impression that they must obsess over doing good daily, and that their best must be on display in every class period, and that they should keep the old adage around that they be working toward their future self every day. I realized that, in the classroom and out of it, I am at times a villain, and on my best days, an antihero. A certain calm has set in with this realization. The ground beneath me settled a bit, my shoulders loosened, my cape billowed.

What my students, our children, taught me, have been teaching me loudly, is that the classroom should be a living space, and the goals of the day must be flexible. Each class should be an issue of a comic, and the characters in the drama diverse and complicated.

I realized that I could encourage growth and learning in my community of classmates by playing whatever my role was that day, that week. It began to happen organically. Once I was willing to acknowledge that my goals for them were static, and thus often lifeless, I was able to change immediate course, and lean in to the collection of beings in front of me. I teach Psychology, and am a Psychologist. I would need to speak this science to their lives, and allow them the space to absorb, study and dismiss this material as they saw fit. It has rattled me at times, and in a suitably invigorating way.

I wanted to draw them closer around the story of our shared classroom, and so they would need the most natural version of me present with them, if I were going to demand that of them. And so, I began to see the version of myself that I have come to know as Yinde, acolyte of Shango. I imagined that each concept was a belief in Shango, lost god, and I as his acolyte was meant to see him raised and glorious again. I was the lightning bringer, the conqueror. The story was meant to play out over the semester, a grand stage.

I challenged my classmates to oppose every concept and build their own understanding, to treat knowledge as native to them, to see me as hording this knowledge and our classroom space and their questions as means for victory, and salvation. I challenged them to represent themselves and community, and tribe, and generation. I asked them to defy the stigma, and beliefs. I poked and prodded. Generally, they became a team of sorts, many of them.

Classrooms, like nature, are spaces that abhor a vacuum, it would seem. And so, I started seeing them gaining the sense of themselves as part time collaborators with me, and part time crusaders pushing back to ensure that they filled this space with all of themselves, as I had been guiding them to do.

Something became clear to me, about teaching, and being taught how to teach our children, specifically. They are resistant, rightly so, to being taught as if we truly live in a meritocracy. They want to know that they are seen, are being made a meal fit for them as they are in this moment when they are in our classroom spaces. They want to close the emotional distances between them and us, they want to be affirmed as beings before any and all other things. They want for us to demonstrate that we are willing to scheme with them to disrupt the various systems which would judge them as fit or unfit, and choose how to best consume their person. They want us to scheme with them to weaponize their grand beliefs and plans, and with certainty, they want to see us allow for their grandiosity, and often flawed logic, and their complicated greatness. They want us present for these grand adventures.

I picture myself walking these halls and into classrooms at Claflin, and engage my students as if they are all super powered. As if we are all meant for greater things, because in some profoundly childlike way, I believe that we are. I want them to see me, and us, as present with them as they tell these stories. I want for them to determine how the parable is sewn, and how the first verse gets spit. They are made ready for this, and seem so foreign to us as they are from a star different than our own. They are marvelous, and frustrating and godly.

As for us, the teachers and Professors, so called. I ask that you spend time in your lair, or headquarters, seeing to your wellness. Plan and scheme ways to affirm yourself by crafting your story. Make it ever changing. Throw out all expectations that do not lead to you running with our children into a wild, raucous version of themselves. Arm yourself with the fair knowing that you will never reach all, and that your concept of winning may not be theirs, and maybe winning need never be the goal, and that you are doing far better work than even you know, and you are seen and loved by our charges who so often struggle with the vocabulary to relay that to us, and that you might very well be the Mastermind who awakens our needed Chosen One in the classroom. Know and feel, all of this.

Be willing to live with feeling unsettled, and tired, but do not allow for burnout. Reach out to me, should you need, I have ambrosia for your soul. Check in on me. Always believe in our children, our young developing heroes and villains and antiheroes, as they are essential to our story. To their story, to curing all of this. Put on your supersuit every day as you ready, keep it charged. See them.

I will be with you. A shrine to Shango in my office. Black suit, Black tie. Eyes and digits crackling with electricity, head full of purpose. Preparing to teach and learn, and battle, and roar in victory and defeat, and turn the page, and start again, and watch them fly, and fly.

Their mental wellness in our shared class spaces relies heavily on the room that we allow for them to experiment with pulling forward, interrogating and shaping beliefs. Our mental wellness largely falls down to the truths we tell ourselves about why we do what we do, and what we come to expect of them, and ourselves. We must be essentially selfish at times, and kind always, and examples of the emotional tumult that comes from learning and growing, and we must be connected, and willing to ask for help when we are cast adrift. For ultimately, we are human, no?

Have a great semester, all of you.