Genuine Lightheartedness

Here’s another post from 2012:

When that feeling of resentment comes up inside of me when I feel that too many of my students aren’t trying, I realize what quicksand that anger represents for me, and so I avoid it at all costs.

When I try to replace that anger and resentment with a kind of lightheartedness, but it is a false kind of lightheartedness, the kids see right through that.

When I try, with all my heart, to make the feeling of lightheartedness real, it works. Something comes into me, something divinely inspired, and I am able to not let the anger ruin my connection and communication with my kids, even in the face of the most unconscious adolescent, with the exceptions already discussed here this year in the Pigs Can’t Fly articles.

In our profession, we must cultivate genuine lightheartedness, or the CI won’t fly. What a true challenge! Our success in this profession depends almost entirely on how much we can genuinely relax in a building in which most people are functioning at some level of caffeine-cut fear!

We must cut through the fear, and we must do it sometimes hundreds of time a day. It’s not something we can do ourselves, really. We need help to move out of anger and resentment with our students, and to make it a thing of the past.