@steve-o

Hi Steve-O

I am sorry for your suffering. On a positive note, please note that you are blessed to be part of a nobel profession. I hold a lot of respect for teachers of any kind as they guide us in becoming better students of life.

I can relate to your situation as I have been involved in teaching over the last few years as a pay back to my profession. I teach adults who bring a lot of challenges to the table and are always in the question mode. I am in mid thirties and by right, I should be able to relate to them as we are not too far apart in terms of age and I have the relevant work experience, but in the first few months to a year, I was constantly questioning myself if I was doing a good job. I would often feel embarrassed, doubt my capabilities and had more bad days than good days.

I will share how I turned things around for myself:

1. by accepting that we are all students. Even students can teach us something valuable. This helped me open up to new experiences, which I was denying myself by thinking that I am the teacher / facilitator and students should just learn from my experiences. I am not sure what level you teach but perhaps asking the students their feedback on your teaching style may be a useful learning experience for you. We can all improve everyday in some ways. This also takes away the pressure off us as we dont have to be perfect all the time 🙂

2. By asking some star students in the class on what went well and not so well during the last lesson. You could trial the same and see if you can take some positives out of it and incorporate that into the next lesson.

3. By making the quieter students to contribute to the group as much as the vocal students do. This helped me the most as I could finally relate to where my facilitating skills were lacking. The quiet students can often give you a wealth of information, which you had no clue about. As they are shy, they tend not to step forward with their feedback or questions.

Now getting back to your actual issues.

Please do not feel defeated. Take something positive out of every experience and see where you can improve a little. You don’t have to master everything in a day. Just aim to improve in small ways. Try a new way of teaching. Try explaining a concept in a different style or ask one of the smarter students to share their insight on how they understand it. There are various ways to skin a cat 🙂

The kid who used to be fond of you and is not anymore and wont attend your class —– Hey, do not worry about this kid. The kid will come around when she has sorted her own issues out. Don’t make her issue yours. You are a teacher and you should remain completely neutral for all students. The moment you start to associate feelings or emotions towards one student, teaching takes a back seat. I know we all have our favourites in the class but we are in-charge of a big responsibility, which requires us to be professional at all times. Leave the emotions out of it as it doesn’t take too long to cross the thin line between our personal and professional obligations. Emotions help to create an unnecessary expectation and expectations often lead to disappointments if we are not careful.

Anxiety issues —– this is an issue that you need to explore and understand where does your anxiety stem from ? Are you afraid of rejection ? Do you have a fear of failure ? Do you need validation from students to feel good ? Do you look outwards for happiness or a sense of well-being ? Only you can work on this issue and you can find some support in the form of therapy if need be.

You can hit the reset button everyday in your own mind if you wish. It is really that easy. You don’t have to go to Peru to do that but Peru is a lovely place so go there for a holiday 🙂

Hey, the more you tell that mind of yours how bad you feel, the worse it will make you feel. The negativity slope is a slippery one, which only runs downwards. Don’t let yourself ever go down that path as it is difficult to get up quickly. Remember, you are doing a great job and always think of the huge contributions you have made in the lives of these students. I am sure many of the students think of you very fondly but may not have come and told you so. Some kids just don’t do that hahaha.

Work on always improving yourself and then you will never have self-doubts. No person is perfect in this world but we can always strive to become better by learning from every experience.

Hope this helps. Cheer up and chin up. You are awesome.

Jasmine

Oh, I can’t edit my post anymore, but I wanted to add that we all feel fear and anxiety and we all are unique. The trick is not to allow that fear to take over you and allow you to make your decisions and actions for you, and we shouldn’t try to be something that we are not in order to win the approval of others. Being genuine is always more appealing than being fake, and pushing forward regardless of a bit of fear has always won the hearts of others 🙂 That is appealing and influential.

Oh, I understood that you weren’t teaching children (as they wouldn’t have a choice to not attend your class), but wasn’t sure what sort of students these were. And to be fair, even adults can behave in incredibly childish ways. There’s also the ego thing that comes up with adult students.

I’ve been a technical trainer and in general am constantly faced with situations where I need to explain something complex and technical to another person. There is indeed a tricky balance to be found. If you oversimplify, they will be hurt that you’d think that they weren’t clever enough to understand the topic. If you get too technical, you might inadvertently make them feel stupid. Different people react in different ways when they feel stupid. What we want, of course, is for them to say that they don’t understand and would like you to lower your level a bit so that they can catch up. Unfortunately that’s not really how it usually goes. Some will be quiet and pretend that they understand, even though they don’t. Some will get upset and defensive, even a bit aggressive. I don’t take it personally anymore though it’s never fun when someone gets upset instead of explaining to me that they are confused.

When I was still a technical trainer in the telecom field, my training sessions weren’t cheap. I didn’t personally get all the money, but in any case, the companies paid a lot of money for my services. I didn’t always perform in a way I wish I had, but what can you do? You can’t take it back, you can’t change history, and sometimes there really were some very difficult students. One man tried to have sex with me and when I refused, he made sure that my course for the next day was as difficult as possible. It was stupid.

In general, it would be so good for your anxiety to acknowledge that how people treat you often does not have that much to do with you. Sometimes you just trigger something in another person and they start to act out their own fears and anxieties. It’s normal.

You don’t have to take drugs to cure it. Compassion helps. Now that you are abroad, seek some kind souls to spend time with, who can alleviate your anxiety. Don’t just think about it and isolate yourself. It’ll blow out of proportion and you stop seeing the situation from a neutral and realistic perspective.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 5 months ago by The Ruminant.

Hello Steve,

How is your Saturday going? Hope you are enjoying this wonderful week.

Congratulations on studying Masters degree. You should be very proud.

I thought I may ask you few questions that may help you when you think and answer them.

So Why do you teach? What is your personal purpose of teaching?

Would you tell someone that they are a failure because one person or may be more don’t like him/her? So, why you tell yourself.

Say one nice thing about you everyday. You need to, because my friend you are a teacher and there is a great respect for them.

Last, the person affected you because of their behavior. If you let everyone affect you then you become the product of their behavior. Make your own destiny. Let people be how they are. Make your time worthwhile. Be selfish and teach and have fun.

Teaching is fun because you get to be a giver of knowledge and you get to question the status quo of knowledge.

Watch Tedtalks of Sir Ken Robinson. He has a theory about education. More than that, I love that he gives much deserved credits to teachers.

Thank you Steve for reading this and I hope that you know that I am rooting for you.

Passionate Self

Steve, I totally relate to your experience. I hope whatever I say doesn’t hijack your thread and is instead helpful to you, as I am not giving advice, as I don’t think I have anything to give on this issue. I found this thread because of a google search I was desperately doing on the issue of work and embarassment, fear of failure, etc. I also am a teacher. I do early intervention work with children with autism under the age of 3. That is not the issue. The issue is how I emotionally deal with an incredibly diverse reactions from the parents of the children, whom I work closely with, and naturally are super-concerned with how they’re children are doing and how I am working with them. In a given day, ex. this past Friday, one parent thinks I am God, and another parent appears to be questioning my commpetency. One parent is asking me appropriately what they should do with their child. Another parent is telling me what I should do different and are totally not open to why I might be doing what I am doing. So, if I let my opinion of myself be dependent upon the reactions of the parents, my sense of self-worth is like a balloon blowing in the wind, with very powerful winds that can change direction in a moment. I cognitively understand all of this, yet this understanding has barely helped me. I don’t say this to be negative, or to take away from the wisdom of other replies to your post. They are spot-on. I have found it somewhat helpful to meditate on these issues, as it has helped me slow down my thoughts, and also to separate my higher observer self from the actual thoughts, thereby not identifying myself as the thoughts, but more an observer, and probably most importantly, a compassionate observer. Haven’t quite gotten to that point. I deal with these issues in therapy. Can talk more about this if you ask me too, but I am in grave danger of hijacking the thread. I will just conclude that I have always had a major issue in defining my self-worth based upon the opinion of others. It is painful and I empathize with you to the max.
Art

Well, if you’ve been involved outside of the class as well, then it could be any number of things why she got upset. It’s not anymore just about your teaching ability, but her personal feelings about you and herself. Women around the world get upset all the time about all kinds of things and men around he world stay perplexed why it happens 🙂

One other thing occurred to me though. You didn’t explain the whole situation in your original post, even though you must understand it probably is a factor in the whole situation. We’re all pretty much anonymous here, yet you still felt like you needed to hide it. It is as if you are judging yourself and fear that others will judge you, too.

Keeping secrets and living in shame will add quite a lot to your anxiety, and may even be the cause of it. Being open and honest about things will automatically force you to accept the reality as it is, and after that it’s much, much easier to let go of things. It’s like acknowledging something you don’t want to hold onto anymore and letting it go and recycling it, instead of not wanting to deal with something you don’t want to hold onto, and then cramming it into your closet. In the latter case, you’ll always know that it’s still there, in the closet, and it will most probably pop back into your mind when you least expect it (especially when falling asleep).

If you don’t want to admit everything to other people, then at least write it down and be honest with yourself. There is a reason why taking a moral inventory is part of the 12 step program. Now, I’m not saying that you’ve done anything immoral, but you seem to think that you’ve done something wrong, as otherwise you would’ve been straightforward about it. Holding onto guilt and shame makes life more difficult than it has to be 🙂

I feel like I must stress that I really wasn’t judging you for not telling 🙂 It was just an observation mostly based on the type of words you used (“come clean”) and the explanations. Keeping things hidden for what ever reason can start to weigh on a person over time. It’s not just about keeping things hidden from other people, but yourself as well. If you can be unapologetically yourself, then there’s no room for second guessing anymore about whether or not you should’ve done things differently.