Episode 7: Veronica

Dreading going back to school? So was Veronica. And then? A miracle of her own making.

Transcript

Veronica got in touch with me for an individual psycho-coaching session because, she told me, she wasn’t feeling any joy in her teaching.

Does that sound familiar? Yes – if you listened to Episode 2 of this podcast, where Jeremy lost his joy at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. Or if you yourself have felt the joy drain out of you for whatever reason – and there are so danged many reasons these days.

I knew Veronica by reputation. She is an energetic, optimistic, good-humored, and, well, intense teacher of high school English. One of those teachers who won’t take “no” for an answer – not because she’s controlling or draconian but because She. Will. Never. Give. Up. And so won’t let her students give up either.

I say this, but the first thing Veronica told me when we met was that she was ready to quit. She has actually started training to be a nutritionist. She still wants to help people, but she is just so tired of pulling teeth: convincing students to get their work done, to pay attention, to put their devices away. Especially now, post-COVID – ish – when students’ – and, frankly others’ – behaviors are just devolving.

“The other day,” Veronica told me, “my students complained about the book I’d assigned them to read. I had chosen it to replace one of the novels that my predecessor had assigned that was old and, uch, I didn’t like it. This one? The one I assigned? It was a book I loved!! It changed my life!! I was so hurt that the students didn’t like it.”

My ears perked up.

“And on top of that,” Veronica said, “they’re telling me how much they hate the book while their noses are in their frickin’ phones! According to research, they spend up to 15 hours a day looking at a screen. I mean, what the -- ? I have no idea how to battle that addiction. I’m overwhelmed. I cannot stand this. I. Give. Up.”

Not so fast.

[break]

I have said it before and I’ll say it again: When I hear “That hurt my feelings,” I know there’s emotion work to be done.

Why? To put it really simply, I am fully responsible for my own feelings. You, no matter how evil or awful you are, are not responsible for my feelings. You are responsible for your feelings; you are responsible for your actions. You might be a despicable and sadistic person who can’t manage your own feelings and so makes a career of giving them to other people by acting out on those people. But my feelings of hurt – or anger or sadness or jealousy or fear – wherever they come from, are mine to understand and manage. So that I don’t act them out on you.

And, frankly? My feelings are a gold mine that will benefit me incalculably if I work with them.

So, with Veronica, I went for the hurt feelings.

I started with an image. Cuz Veronica was hurting, and I had to help her get some distance from her hurt. Detaching from her feelings would allow her to wonder about them, which is what emotion work is all about.

So I made a lovely triangle with my fingers, holding them up like this so my computer camera could catch it.

This triangle, I told Veronica, represented her classroom. At one vertex – I pointed my chin helpfully to the corner where the thumb and forefinger of my left hand join – is her, the teacher. At another vertex – chin pointing to the same corner on my right hand – are the students. At the apex – I tapped the tips of my two index fingers together – is the course content. Got it?

(This is how David and Frances Hawkins of the Hawkins Centers of Learning talk about classrooms, too. Based, I suspect, on work done by philosopher Martin Buber. Just for the record.)

For me, the vertices of this let’s-call-it Teaching Triangle – the points on the triangle – are interesting and important. Right? The teacher, the students, and the content. Gotta know about them.

But most interesting to me are the lines between the vertices.

Because the lines between the vertices represent the relationships. And relationships are what teaching and learning are all about.

This is such an important statement. It’s the basis of everything I do as a teacher, teacher educator, and psycho-coach. That is: Learning emerges out of relationship. You simply cannot have learning without relationship. You can have a teacher. You can have a student. And you can have some content. A book, say. But you won’t have learning unless someone reaches out and makes contact with one (or more) of those things. And you can’t just touch and run. You’ve got to engage.

Truth is, engaging with people and ideas can be risky and fraught and can bring up lots of resistant behaviors. Especially if you’ve got negative beliefs, about yourself, about school as a whole, about people – like teachers, students, and parents. Negative beliefs you may not even know you have but that make engaging super hard, of not impossible.

Negative beliefs. Like “I’m stupid.” Like “Students will go for the jugular if they sense I’m vulnerable.” Like “I’m a failure if I’m not perfect.” Like “School is a prison.” Like “I’m not gonna get what I desperately need.”

We all have negative beliefs. Whether we’re conscious of them or not. We’re all capable of negative thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Haha! But we also have incredibly positive power and energy! Like Veronica, who has been teaching for 17 years and hasn’t let up. Who has responded to and inspired and believed in hundreds of students. Even when the contentshe has taught was uch. Like the tired old novels her predecessor assigned. That she had excitedly replaced!

So I acknowledged with Veronica that she had a strong and positive relationship with the content in this instance, with the book she had assigned the students to read. She loved that book! She had read it at a particularly profound and difficult time in her life and was psyched to share it with her students!

That is, the line between Veronica and the apex of her Teaching Triangle just buzzed with positive energy. Into my computer camera I enthusiastically wiggled the index finger of my left hand.

Ahh. But then there was the line between the students and the book. It buzzed with negative energy. They hated it! I waggled the index finger of my right hand.

And the students’ hatred charged the line between Veronica and the students. She hated them! For hating the book! Woggling thumbs.

Which made for a very unstable triangle. Haha! It actually collapsed the triangle. Because Veronica’s buzzing love for this book amounted to fusion. She and the book became One. Picture my index fingers falling on top of my thumbs. No more apex. No more separate content. No more lines-between the content and anyone else. Just an appalled teacher who has taken her students’ independent opinions totally personally. 

That is, the line between Veronica and the content, the book, shrank to a single point. And the line between Veronica and her students got really jaggedy, even cut off. Because, if the students hated the book, they hated Veronica. And if they hated Veronica, she hated them. Or, at least, she wanted to get away from them. To the extreme that she wanted to quit.

Wow. That’s a messed up Teaching Triangle.

But it’s super normal. You a teacher? Love your content? It can be so easy to fuse with what you love and take it personally when your students just won’t get on board. Worse – when they act badly. It can be so easy to stop seeing those students as interesting human beings and, rather, as a monolithic bloc of resistance. That’s just getting in the way.

Super normal. And super problematic.

Because teaching means that the students need to develop their own relationships with the content. And that the connection between us – the teachers – and the students needs to be open and communicative. If we’re gonna teach and students are gonna learn, we need a strong triangle with energy coursing between all the vertices.

But hold on: Before she shut it down, Veronica had that triangle. She had the energy. It just wasn’t the energy she was looking for.

But it was energy. Strong, forceful, buzzing energy.

“What if,” I asked Veronica, “you asked the students why they hated the book so much?”

Oh – I gotta stop here and share an important trick. I call it “doing aikido.” Aikido being a martial art where your opponent’s momentum is used against them. Bear in mind: I am not a martial artist nor do I know, really, anythingabout aikido. I just use the term because it kind of captures what I recommend teachers do. If you’re an aikido master? Ugh! Fast forward like 20 seconds.

For those of you who are still with me, I picture doing aikido thus: I’m standing here and you’re over there all pissed off at me. You charge at me and, at the very last moment, when you’re about to plow into me, I swing aside like a door and you, expecting resistance from me, instead go sprawling. And I go place my foot on your back and declare victory.

No. Of course I reach out a hand and help you up.

When I suggested Veronica ask the students why they hated the book so much, I was suggesting she do some aikido with them. Go with their energy even though it was negative. Hell, it was energy! Which indicated there was something going on between the students and the content. Which is what we’re after, right?

Right! Riiight?

I mean, if you’re aiming to help students foster relationships with content – that is, engage with it, care about it, make sense of it, use it in their lives – then look for an emotional response. Disgust, anger, impatience, frustration, love, hate – you can’t feel these things if you’re disconnected. As one of my therapists once put it, the opposite of love – perhaps the highest form of connection – is NOT hate. It’s indifference. Disconnection. Lack of feeling. Lack of relationship.

Hate, on the other hand, is fueled by the same engine as love. I know, I know: Hate is a strong word. Etc. And it’s a very bad thing when it leads to violence. But hate, when channeled, can be a very interesting thing. It is, after all, a sign of connection, of relationship. Do aikido with it!!

Okay, said Veronica. Do aikido with the students’ energy towards the book. But what about the phones?

More buzzing energy. This time positive energy between the students and their phones – the phones being the apex of the Teaching Triangle – negative energy between Veronica and phones, and negative energy between Veronica and the students.

Well, I thought. Maybe there’s a way to do aikido with the damn phones.

“Aren’t the things you post on Instagram called ‘stories’?” I asked Veronica. I’ve heard that, but I honestly don’t know why they’re called stories or what even counts as a story on Instagram. I wondered with Veronica if asking students to define Instagram stories – and to describe what makes a good Instagram story – could start them talking about literary stories (and novels) and what makes a good literary story (or novel). Hahaha!! Maybe the students could even create Instagram stories about the story they just read (and hated)! What would that look like? How could they get people to “heart” that?

What I personally loved about this idea was that it would fire up the line between Veronica and her students. The line that right now was jagged, even ruptured. Asking about Instagram would make Veronica the student of her students’ deep knowledge and experience of the content – Instagram and, more generally, phones – with which shehad little to no relationship. This question would simultaneously acknowledge the students as legitimate experts and Veronica as someone who needed and – this is key – wanted to learn from them. 

Nice.

Veronica and I spent most of an hour talking with energy about the students’ energy. Coming up with different ideas for making use of it. By the time the hour was up, Veronica had a plan. She could not wait to try it out.

[break]

Veronica and I met a week later. Veronica launched right in.

“Last week,” she said, “you gave me permission to have a conversation with the students about their not-love for the book that I loved. Which I did. It was a success!!”

WH-A-A-A-T? What happened?

Veronica explained that she had started by asking the students to describe the elements that make a good story. What in particular engages them? Then she asked them to write down the reasons they liked and/or disliked the book they’d read the previous week. She gave them paper with a “Like” column and a “Dislike” column as well as, she said, “a list of things to ponder” as they filled out the columns.

“They had a lot to say!” she told me. The fact that the students were all able to list things they liked and disliked about the book reminded Veronica that the kids who had vehemently hated the book were actually just a subset of the class, that there were plenty of students who actually liked the book.

Can I just say? Beware of focusing on the negative.

And here’s something else that surprised Veronica: Even the haters found value in the book.

Which she would never have known, of course, if she hadn’t asked.

“This is the one that blew my mind,” Veronica told me. One of the students wrote in her Dislike column that the main female character in the book was merely an object. “It was unfair that her character wasn’t developed more,” this student said. Veronica was dumbfounded. “I didn’t even think of this,” she told her students. “But now that you say it, I see it!”

OH. MY. GOD. The student’s analysis opens the teacher’s eyes to a really important critique that could certainly justify hating a book. Do you feel the Teaching Triangle vibrating like crazy right now?

Veronica was so so so excited about this class. “I was holding back tears!” she said. “Everybody left that class feeling good, feeling heard. I wanted to tell every teacher I saw! And the next day? I wanted to go to school and be with the kids. I felt that we were on a different level. We all had a victory.”

And get this: Veronica said that, overall, the students “liked the message of the book” they had read. They even “brought it up later” in the week. That, to me, is a sign of success: When students continue to talk about what they’ve learned because it has become relevant in their lives. It has transformed them. That’s what I mean by a buzzing line-between.

OK that would do it. Success story – “victory” – for Veronica and her students. But Veronica’s story did not end there.

OK so: The next day was Veronica’s school’s Halloween Day. One of her students dressed up as her, as Veronica. When Veronica saw this, she told the student – let’s call her Daisy – to be the teacher for the first few minutes of class. (Aikido, anyone?) Daisy happily stood at the door to the classroom, greeting her peers as they entered, and when class began, Daisy told one of Veronica’s biggest “pains in the ass” to get off his phone. He did for a second, then, you know, went back on. Daisy approached him a second time with “Didn’t I just ask you to put the phone away?” When Pain in the Ass gave her the defiant look Veronica knew so well, Daisy threw in the towel. “You can take over now,” she told Veronica. “Teaching is too hard.”

Later that day Daisy appeared in Veronica’s classroom with a decorated box labeled “Phone Prison.” “How should we use it?” one of Veronica’s students asked. Hahaha!!! This is what is called engagement. That kid was reaching out for the Phone Prison. Get that kid to answer his own question! Get the whole class in on it! Make contact. Engage!!!!

And this happened before Veronica even talked with the students about their phone use. “I’m tackling the phones on Monday,” Veronica told me. Her plan? “Monday is poetry day. I’m going to give the students some questions about phones. ‘What do you feel when you’re on the phone?’ ‘What is it like?’ etc. I’m going to tell them to get on their phones for 5 minutes and answer the questions. Then I’m going to ask them to use their answers to construct a free verse poem.” Hahahaha!!! “I’m so excited about this!” Veronica said.

“When I talked to you last week,” Veronica told me, “I was ready to give my notice. If my husband had said, ‘Yep, you go ahead and quit,’ I would have gone ahead and quit. And I’m still exhausted.

“But I’m excited to get back with the kids! Isn’t that awesome?” Veronica asked.

Yes, I said. Yes it is.

[break]

I gotta say. This story feels miraculous. It is why this psycho-coaching, this emotion work that I do, blows my very own mind. Because, in a mere hour, someone who wanted to quit teaching that very day transformed (back) into a hopeful, confident, creative, student-loving teacher. Who felt joy. And excitement. And energy.

How did this happen? Two ways, as far as I can tell. One way was for Veronica to detach from her strong emotions, from her hurt feelings, and wonder about those feelings. There are lots of ways to detach fruitfully from emotions, to not take things personally, but in this case the Teaching Triangle really did the trick. Because it allowed us to see in no uncertain terms the cause of Veronica’s hurt: the students’ insistence on having independent opinions about the content. The need for Veronica to let go of her beloved book (without letting go of her love for it!) and let it and the students be.

By merging with the book and resisting her students’ disagreeable responses to it – did you hear that? Veronica, not the students, was being resistant! – Veronica totally missed that her students’ strong feelings about the book were a godsend. They were the key to everyone’s transformative learning. Those strong feelings were exactly what Veronica needed to do her job!

Here’s the second source of the miracle, then: Veronica did aikido with her students. She stopped fighting them and went with them. By asking them about their relationship to the book. And, importantly, really wanting to know.

And the students engaged. Amazingly. And solidified an understanding of the book that they brought up throughout the week. Meaning that line between the students and the content – their relationship, their knowing and learning – continued to crackle.

Not only that, but by activating the line between the students and the content, Veronica repaired the line between the students and her. And BY GOD this repair led to a revelation for Veronica. Her students taught her something about the book that she had not noticed before! Which enriched the already bounteous line between her and the content.

The energy, the connections, just went on and on. Which? By the way? Fueled Veronica’s joy. She actually said it to me (at our second meeting): “You are really helping me bring joy back into my teaching.”

And don’t forget what’s going to happen on Monday. Oh, hell, why be coy? Monday already happened. When Veronica asked her students to go meta on their relationships with their phones and write free verse poems about them, what happened? “WHOA!” Veronica told me. “Their poems were amazing.” AND, once again, she learned something. “The kids’ phones are an escape from reality,” Veronica told me. Which might seem obvious. But what might not be obvious is that the students know this, too.

And, miracle of miracles: After going meta and reflecting on their relationships with their phones, students are now acting differently in Veronica’s classes. “Their behaviors are changing,” Veronica told me. “They’re starting to police each other more. ‘Hey, get off your phone!’ And I’m listening now, not blocking them. (More aikido.) I’m not dreading being there all the time.”

Hoo.

So here’s today’s axiom: Open the Teaching Triangle. And, of course, the obvious corollary: Do aikido with the energy that’s released. Frolic with it.

Just as every vertex on the Teaching Triangle is important – you, the students, the content – so are the lines between. Look for them. Gauge the energy coursing (or not) along them. Design your instruction to spark them.

And, here’s another corollary: In especially difficult times, look to your thumbs. Activate the baseline between you and your students.

That is, when all else fails – when students are freaking out, when they won’t cooperate, when they hate your lesson, when they’re disrespectful, when they’re on their phones – strengthen the relationship between you and your students. How? One powerful way is to design lessons that tap into the students: their experience, their opinions, their knowledge. Lessons that make engagement impossible to resist.

But UHHH. “Now, of all times,” you might be thinking, “when I’m feeling burned out and exhausted, now is when I have to go for the baseline? Now is when I have to work on my relationship with students? I just want the students to behave and learn. I. Don’t. Have. The. Energy.”

But neither did Veronica.

In addition to learning about the awesome Teaching Triangle and the sneaky strategy of doing aikido with her students, Veronica also learned this: That going for the baseline, connecting with the students by fostering their engagement with the content and wanting to hear what they had to say, was ENERGIZING. It made her happy. It made her “excited to get back with the kids.”

And it appears to have made the students happy, too.

It is no coincidence that this line between my two thumbs is the base of the Teaching Triangle. Because this relationship – the relationship between you the teacher and your students – is the basis of all classroom learning. The line that keeps the triangle open and fat and full and healthy. The line that influences students’ social-emotional development, of course, but also their academic development, their sense of themselves as intellectual beings, as thinkers and knowers and listeners and wonderers.

Sure, the relationship with the content – yours and your students’ – is important. Very important. Can’t have a Teaching Triangle without an apex. And you gotta keep that apex up there, separate from you. But think about it: Which relationship is going to imprint most lastingly on your students?

The relationship with you, people. The relationship with you.