Lessons from 2021

For me, 2021 is a year that has brought me a lot of insight. It's hard for me to keep a post like this short, so I won't. I want this post to focus on the wisdom I learned that I am thankful to have acquired. Some of these are new realizations and others are lessons I've been working on for a few years that have recently become more clear for me.  Though many of them relate to my career as an elementary educator, they have applications in my personal life as well. 

~Acceptance~

I'm starting with acceptance because nearly everything else I've learned this year relates directly to it. It has been my most important mantra. My year began with me feeling quite unable to find peace with certain realities of the dating world. I learned that I needed to accept these things that I don't like because they are out of my control. I can influence many outcomes, but I can't control them. And as I got to learning how to accept disappointing realities and still be happy, it led me to ultimately confront a burden I've carried for a long time: my anger. I've been angry for a long time and I never really understood what to do about it. I found that anger is fundamentally a product of unmet expectations. 

If I go to the arcade and start pushing buttons on a game without paying, I won't be mad that it doesn't work because I know it doesn't work without money. But if I pay it and it doesn't work, then I'm mad. I paid the money with the expectation that it would result in the game working. If I try to start a car I know is broken and it doesn't start, I'm not mad. But if I'm trying to get to work, thinking my car would start, and am depending on that vehicle for transportation in a timely fashion and it doesn't start, then I'm mad. I walk into a classroom and kids are talking while I set up. Not angry. I do my "attention-getter'' a few times and ask the class for silence and the talking continues uninterrupted. Now I'm feeling upset. Why? Control. Expectations. I don't have any way to make the outcome the way I'd like it to be. But if I go into that classroom knowing that that's just where that group of kids is developmentally and that they need something from me that the other better-behaved classes don't... if I treat it as a puzzle to be solved, my ability to feel anger about the situation diminishes.

So learning about acceptance has taught me a lot about anger, which I would consider its opposite. And learning to have more mature expectations helps me with acceptance and ultimately has eliminated a great deal of anger from my life. So, I start with acceptance, my mantra and theme for this year, because it is intrinsic to the most important lessons I learned. 

~Ask for what you want~

I'm in my sixth year as a music teacher, which has been enough time for me to really know what I want. For example, some teachers try to help me with behavior management during my lessons and some don't. This year, I realized that I prefer not to have help with it. I found a way that works and I like it best my way. If anyone crosses that boundary in a way I don't like, I always just assume that they don't know that I have that boundary and were just trying to help my lesson go smoothly, and then I let them know what I want to change. I've been nervous about asking for a change every time and, every time so far, I have been glad I brought it up. I go into this understanding that I may ask and still not get what I want, but it will still be worth it for all of the times I do get what I want. 

~Don't assume intent~

I don't know if it's cultural or biological or both, but for a species of creature that definitely does not have the power of telepathy, we sure do come to a lot of conclusions about what other people are thinking. It wouldn't be such a bad thing if 1) we weren't so wrong all the time and 2) we didn't base such important decisions on such unreliable data. I see this happen a lot. It happened a lot to me when I was a kid and I see it happening to kids now: "You're being disrespectful!" From an adult's perspective, I might not like that behavior and that it may be in direct opposition to my wishes, but suggesting to a child that their behavior is malicious is extremely toxic. It really seeps into one's self-perception. We forget that children are rather disabled compared to adults when it comes to cognitive skills and are new both to our rather intricate set of rules and to their own rapidly-evolving bodies and minds, yet we often expect them to have the same familiarity and fluency with our complex social norms as we do, including the ability to follow directions. We can't comprehend what might really be going on in their heads. How does one defend themself against such a baseless accusation of "disrespect"? I, the adult, may not be able to prove myself right, but they can't prove me wrong either, so they lose by default because the adult's boss. And we go about perpetuate this narrative that little Johnny was being disrespectful, when maybe, he's having a hard day, doesn't know how to handle it, and doesn't have the skills to communicate his needs. 

We do this with adults too. We see other people who are doing things we don't like and we assume that they are being intentionally disruptive. A business has a policy that disrupts your plans. A server makes a mistake. People of certain religious or political leanings defend ideas that make the opposite of sense to us or engage in behaviors that we find unforgivably counterproductive to the health of our society. So we often boil it down to a quantitative depravity of moral integrity. Or we assume that the coworker who does something in a way we don't like did it that way with the intention of reducing our happiness. We assume that the "others" care less about doing the right thing than we do. Understanding how vulnerable human behavior is to the powerful currents of our surroundings does not mean that we should excuse all behavior we find harmful or that rules are meaningless, but it does give us some important tools for addressing and preventing social injury, not only with more compassion, but with greater efficacy. It helps to understand that most people, like me, are just trying not to screw up. I'm free to think that bad things are done by bad people. It is easier and simpler to see it that way, after all, but then I'd be missing out on the truth and on real solutions I might not have known were available to me. For that reason, my strategy is to 1) refrain from judgement of other people's emotional states or intentions and 2) ask questions that invite a reasonable answer. 

~Just because what you got isn't what you wanted, it doesn't mean you won't love what you got~

I introduced this phrase and philosophy into my teaching toolbox this year because I loathe "you get what you get and you don't throw a fit." I think that that phrase needs to be eliminated from all teachers' vocabularies because it doesn't really offer a helpful solution to the intense emotions a child may be feeling at the time of disappointment. It ignores the fact that disappointment is overwhelming, confusing, distracting, and a total buzz-kill. This all winds us back again to expectations and not getting your preferred outcome. We can look at this on small scales like giving various boomwhackers to 7-8 year olds and comforting the ones that didn't get their preferred color, or looking at other outcomes like the fact that I'm a divorced 34-year-old as opposed to the married bliss I pictured on my wedding day. I didn't get what I chose, but I do love what I got. 

~Every child is their current age for their first and last time~

Every child is at their current stage of life for the first time ever and they don't know what comes next. After they've had the opportunity to learn how to be their age, they stop being that age and become a new older age where their existing knowledge is obsolete. Learning how to exist in society is a demanding process and I think it's easy for adults to be oblivious of the burden every child carries. For that reason, I discourage belittling comments like, "You've known this rule since 1st grade! Why can't you follow it now?" The truth is that it is not reasonable to expect what first graders do well to come out of fifth graders because first graders and fifth graders are very different creatures with different abilities and responsibilities. Being a fifth grader is complicated in ways that being a first grader isn't, which is why fifth grade (and middle school) behavior is the way it so frequently is. That's not something to be mad about, even though it is hard to deal with. This is simply what being in that state of life involves. Fifth graders are no more experienced at being fifth graders than first graders are at being first graders. That's just the way the world is. That's the way the river flows at that bend. It's not the water's fault. 

Every child is at their current stage of life for the very last time. There's no do-overs. This is where we as educators need to recognize the sanctity of every day, hour, and second a child gives to us of their lives. They give us pieces of their childhood and we have the ability to either respect those pieces of their lives they give to us or to defile them. Every day, they are the only version of themself that they have been prepared to be. The respect they deserve is without merit. If we wait until adulthood to show kids respect, then kids who don't live to adulthood live their whole lives without being respected. We should not let the destination spoil the journey. A journey is all it will ever be, so if we don't teach them how to enjoy the journey now, they may go their whole lives never learning how to be happy. 

This same principle applies past childhood as well. Everyone is the oldest they've ever been and will never be so young again. Accept where life's river has moved them today, regardless of how much you like their orientation with the world, because neither you, they, nor I control the currents that carry us from day to day. Even if it isn't their last day on earth, it is both their first and final run through that day and they deserve your support, at least, in not making it a bad one. 

~Monsters don't create themselves~

This is actually an older mantra for me that I picked up a few years ago. I find that it is applicable in every aspect of human interaction when someone behaves in a way we don't like. Whether it's related to the "monster" I may have thought one of my exes to be, a student acting out, behavior of adults at work, behavior of adults I hear about of the news, etc... it has helped me immensely to recognize that none of us is our own mother. We are not self-created. We are the product of events that have been in motion for eons. Humans are a very unusual kind of ape. Of course our behavior tends to be absurd! We are absurd creatures. We all have our unpleasantries, but we didn't choose them. Our behavior is so frequently interrupted by our environment that it is absurd, when you really stop to think about it, to think that any aspects of any person could truly be their own design. That is where acceptance comes back in again. We have to let people off the hook for being born because the river was already in motion before they opened their eyes. You can't blame a salmon for being a salmon, or a fire ant for being an invasive species in North America. That doesn't mean that we don't distance ourselves from people who violate the sanctity of our own time in this world - boundaries are super important - but I hope that it makes it harder to harbor resentment against people for being a product of the recipe that made them. 

~Avoid anger by changing your expectations~ 

Sometimes we expect outcomes that aren't as reasonable as they seem to be. And so I've watched adults become furious with children because the adult's expectation and the child's reality clash. But is it the child's fault? No. Children generally don't get to have a lot of control. The river may have swept that individual to a place where certain kinds of compliance are not consistently attainable. Children have things happen to them at home that we don't know about. They may have medical or psychiatric conditions that we don't understand or know about, maybe that haven't been diagnosed yet. There may be communication barriers. But it's unreasonable for us to expect kids to fit any archetype we might envision of how a kid is *supposed* to be and then be offended when their conduct is not harmonious with our own fantasies. 

To take this to an example outside of the educational field to one of my real struggles, I suffered for most of my time following my divorce with the fear of abandonment by future partners. It doesn't help when I see the things about myself that I don't like, such as messiness, or things that I do like about myself that I believe to be incompatible with healthy relationships, like how noisy I am as a roommate due to my frequent music practice. Abandonment became this inevitability in my mind and I couldn't accept it. It made me feel helpless because dependable partnership is something I expected out of life, and for that reason, I've been very bitter. I wanted my pessimistic conclusion to be false, but the truth is that, like everything else in life, love is temporary and there is no choice but to accept it. I don't have to see that as a negative, though. Without change, there is no life. Life is nothing but constant change. It is a fundamental truth that people change. I cannot be held responsible to forever remain the kind of person who is compatible with my partner, nor should she. And though I might not like the fact that marriage and love are not the sacred institutions I once believed and expected them to be, I call back to the mantra, "Just because what you got isn't what you wanted, it doesn't mean you won't love what you got." Maybe love isn't what I wanted it to be, but maybe, if I stop being so scared, I will find it to be an even more beautiful experience than I ever imagined - not in spite of, but BECAUSE of those very qualities that I once found distasteful. This is not to say that I'm not still fearful about dating. I'm just not there yet. But now, with that sense of helplessness and the accompanying anger pacified for the first time in many years, there's not much left holding that fear in place. That makes me feel hopeful. 

~Do not bring hostility into an un-hostile situation~

I don't think it's appropriate to use with children or adults. It is dangerous to teach children to use hostility to control other people's behavior. That's not a behavior we want them repeating at school, at home, in the streets, or anywhere else. Some of them will become cops and will be carrying guns and we will have taught them to use hostility to assert control. It's a dark path. Everybody is going through each day for the first time, so be patient, and for the last time, so try not to ruin it. I have certainly made that mistake with kids in the past. I've done that with peers, colleagues, service people, and maybe most problematically, with people on the internet. What I've come to realize is that I don't see much point to it. I've never found myself glad that I chose to be hostile with someone. I never come out looking like the good guy because of it. It doesn't mean that moments of disempowerment aren't fully justifiable reasons to feel angry - anger is a very important emotion with important roles in our lives - but we must be careful not to allow our discomfort to be contagious as it stands in the way of peaceful resolution. 

~The concept of "authority" is not a useful strategy to use for child behavior management~

Don't get me wrong, I also feel this way in regards to adults. So let's start with the basic premise that "authority" is a made-up concept. Authority doesn't exist anywhere but our own imaginations and the real thing that makes people play along with the "authority" game is the real muscle: power... or control. One of the hardest lessons I had to learn as a teacher is how little power I really have to force people to play along with my "authority" game. There's a lot of *them* and only one *me*. But authority without control is delusion. A man may call himself King of the world as he shouts instructions to passers by, but as long as nobody heeds his instructions, his "authority" is pure madness. Only on the day that people stop ignoring him and start taking him seriously does he gain any demonstrable kind of authority. In the same way is a teacher lost in delusion, yelling at a class of kids, "I'm in charge. Do as I say! Respect my authority. " Well, the kids are probably thinking, "You clearly have no power or else you would have used it already. I don't like you and I don't trust you. So, why should I do as you say?" "Authority," in my opinion, is a degrading way to try to control other people because it excludes others from their right to also feel a sense of control or autonomy.  Teachers need to feel a sense of control, yes, but the students need that too. Whenever someone doesn't have that, things start falling apart. It is crucial to establishing an emotionally stable climate that we ensure that students don't feel powerless or they will become angry and/or anxious. So if I set up a situation where students must surrender their sense of autonomy in order for my lesson to move forward, I'm standing on thin ice and am likely to have a really bad time. 

The most sustainable kind of relationship I have had with my classes have been when we exist harmoniously with the obvious truth that I have very little to zero control in the classroom outside of my powers of charisma and persuasion. This is a particularly salient lesson one learns after doing lots of online lessons with fifth graders, who are most excellent at destroying any illusions I may have of authority or control, especially knowing that I can do nothing about it if they turn off their cameras or just leave. But the lesson has served me well in the physical classroom as well. Though I, the teacher, really can't stop you as the student from doing whatever you were thinking of doing and though my power is only granted by your compliance, I want you to see me as a wise mind to follow for positive outcomes who will make your cooperation worth your while! As a teacher, make being around you into a pleasant experience for both teacher and students, make cooperation rewarding, address dissonant behavior pleasantly and with respect, clarity, and compassion, and be a careful listener; then there will be no need for *authority* because *credibility* goes a lot farther. Kids want a good childhood and I think it's one of the best things I can learn to bring them. It's very hard to develop such a teaching style, but I really think it's worth it. 

~Do not focus on children's future at the expense of their present~

The childhood a person has really impacts the rest of their life.  That is one extremely important reason to take quality of life seriously in schools, especially regarding discipline policies. Yes, we want them to grow up to be well-adjusted adults, but we also want them to have good childhoods. If we can somehow teach kids how to be happy and harmonious with society as kids, they have a better chance of growing into adults who know how to live happily and harmoniously with others. 

~Nobody is entitled to anyone else's attention~

This was a really hard lesson for me and it involved me seeing myself from a very unflattering angle, recognizing behavior and thought patterns in nearly every area of my life where suffering was created by my ignorance of this truth. Again, this is completely inseparable from the concepts of acceptance, expectation, anger, and control. It has implications in our relationships with family, friends, colleagues, students, neighbors, strangers, and even animals. 

I think that a large source of relationship dysfunction comes from this mistaken belief that we are owed attention. We damage our romantic relationships by insisting on a certain amount of or type of attention from our partners and being rather unpleasant about it when those expectations are not met to our liking (which goes back to the rule about not introducing hostility to un-hostile situations). In many other ways, we may strain relationships with family members who don't give us the kind or amount of attention we think they ought to give us... if their heads were screwed on straight. One of the most famous struggles for teachers is students not paying attention. Sometimes, even in our relationship with our furry friends, we hold them longer than they want to be held. 

This is not to say that you or I don't deserve a certain amount of positive attention. We do. It is needed for basic survival. We are communal creatures. But nobody owes their attention to anybody else. We each exist in this world for a short amount of time. That time is finite and precious. Every person who chooses to give your existence a feature in their short window of brain activity is giving you a gift that they can never get back. 

The reason why this is important is that the perspective helps us have more reasonable expectations of others. Wanting someone's attention is a big ask. Teachers, our students don't have to pay attention to us. Yes, there are major incentives both for teachers and students that the students pay attention. Though attendance is mandatory by law, the students don't actually owe us attention and they cannot be coerced into conforming to our expectations. They did not write the laws that force them to attend school, so they owe us nothing.

One may want more of a person's attention and you can certainly try to earn it - there are countless ways to do that - but at the end of the day, if that family member, friend, student, or stranger only offers you a smaller amount of their attention than you were hoping for, receive what they gave you with gratitude. I say to do that not merely because receiving it with gratitude increases the likelihood of getting more, but because there is greater enjoyment from what is received, understanding both what it costs them and how lucky I am to receive any of it at all. You learn to make much with little. Nobody exists for anyone else's pleasure. And none of us even agreed to existing in the first place. Whether we view existence as a gift or as a curse, we didn't earn it either way and it is a responsibility each of us carries for ourselves and ourselves only. I learned to respect that burden every conscious creature carries so that I would understand that whatever attention isn't given to me wasn't meant for me. 

Conclusion

If you got to the bottom of this, thank you for giving me the gift of your attention. I hope that it was worth your time and that it improves your quality of life is some way. I've learned a lot this year and I want to keep that going. What are some profound life lessons life has taught you this year? How does that change your approach to 2022 compared to how you approached 2021? Do you agree with everything I said or do you recommend a different perspective on something I wrote? I would love to hear from you in the comments. Happy New Year!!! 🥳🥳🥳 Stay safe and don't drive intoxicated!