This is a repost from 2011, updated. It is a personal reflection on my career, as I end it up today. What I said then, and the comments made then by other group members, still apply:
I never felt like I was any good at school. It was always a competition in all areas. Who would be the best violinist? Who could sing the best? Who would be the fastest miler or cross country runner? Who would get the highest grades?
I thought I had to be that one. That’s what I got from those around me, especially at Culver Military Academy and Washington U. in St. Louis, during those all important high school and college years when we all make such key decisions about how – not necessarily doing what, but how – we want to spend our lives.
Only now can I get an appreciation for what that did to me. It was devastating. It took my breath away in a strange kind of fear every day. It took away my ability to relax. I lived in fear that I was not good enough. I couldn’t relax!
Now I see it as no great surprise that I then went into teaching. Where else could I direct plays, play in the pit orchestra of the same play I was directing, teach classes I was not trained to teach, work ungodly hours building fitness trails and getting involved in so many projects for which I wasn’t paid, coaching teams, transferring my own desire to come in first into my athletes, and of course teaching five language classes a day, for very little money relative to the effort put in each day?
What caused me to do that for over thirty-five years? I think it was the need to be approved of that drove everything I did. The formula seemed to be that if I worked hard enough and got good enough at stuff, or if my students got good enough, things would be all right and I would be successful in life. I would be loved.
However, now I see that it is possible that I could have learned to play the violin for the beauty, not for the dominance. I could have learned to run for the joy, not for the dominance. I could have learned to teach my students for the beauty, not for the dominance. Teaching for the dominance made me nervous. That thing I learned in high school and college still goes very deep and goes away very very slowly. Today removed a foot from that dragon.
The thing that hurts the most is that I was never able to enjoy my own life during this time. It was all future oriented. How can we give ourselves permission to just be happy? How can we do that?
These thoughts I am writing here were brought into my mind while listening to the following songs. Maybe if we listen to music like this, it will help us understand what we are doing, how we are hurting ourselves:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8-YMpYbRqY&feature=rellist&playnext=1&list=PL6ACFDF707D1F1366
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8-YMpYbRqY&feature=relmfu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=QlfUbIPBKk8
This music, these songs, give me permission to relax. We must learn to relax in our work and in our lives in general, right? This work we do is so hard. But we can learn to relax while doing it. It is the best thing to do. We don’t have to be super teachers. Honestly, it is my opinion that, if we don’t learn to relax, then the method we discuss with such fervor here can’t work.
Let us teach as this man sings. If we can relax and bring the art to our students, then they can also relax when they sit in our classrooms, which alone will spark the beauty we seek in our teaching and bring it to fruition.
We can let go of all that worry associated with teaching. I can let that hard ass driving work thing go for now. I have now found a way to teach that allows me to relax in the manner of the music expressed above by this master from the Gumatj nation (his mother is from the Galpu nation, both are First Nations peoples, now part of Australia).
All this may explain my passion for this work we are doing together right now. If my French teachers at Culver Military and Wash U. hadn’t modeled the death way of teaching for me, prodding me to learn every rule there ever was in the French language, but rather had done things simply and more naturally like we do, maybe in my life I could have learned to relax in the permission-giving atmosphere of a teacher who refused to play the domination game. Oh well.