Teaching as Spiritual Practice

I'm teaching very young children. anywhere from 18 months to 6 years. There is not a huge amount of curriculum, so most of what is being taught is how to be a human being. The soft skills like how to interact with other peers, how to self-regulate, how to focus, how to put on your own shoes and other such self-sufficiency things. I love this stuff. This is the meat of education.  It can go even further, I hope it does go even further, but for now it is really good social emotional and intellectual skills. I want to press ahead with more character building and values, but for right now I'm learning the very basics of it all and that's quite enough to handle without adding anything more. The general ins and outs of management. How do you direct and re-direct other human beings? How should you correct them effectively?

I err on the side of permissiveness and laxity, which I am aware of and am trying to correct, but the problem is the solution is not just to get more strict. Those end up being two sides of the same coin, and it becomes like a passive aggressive person who lets themselves be walked all over until they explode in rage. Not useful, not kind.

What is necessary is a discipline that respects the children and expects a lot from them. Something that gives them the tools to succeed, and allows them to discover discipline for themselves, in a way that generates self-confidence. I'm learning tools, and I'm reflecting on what I've done, and how I might do better. I'm in a really good environment for learning this stuff. Lots of good models, to remind me. I'm learning and unlearning ways of thinking. Ways of thinking are not as easy to change and update as, say, factoids. This is the spiritual practice I'm talking about in the title. The fact that to reform the children I must also reform myself, and the things that bother me or stress me out or frighten me are personal issues and blocks that are my responsibility to work on.

It's a bit like how family and romantic relationships are great for bringing out all our issues. Our triggers and buttons, normally dormant, get pushed, and remind us to stay humble, remind us we still have much work to do, and remind us of what that work is, if we have the patience and awareness to realized it.

It's a lot of work, but I am doing it, and I have confidence I will be able to eventually do an excellent job at teaching, guiding, disciplining. And that's awesome, because it's so important and useful. I of course want to go further, from management to inspiration. I want children who internally, of their own volition, seek peace, seek to help others, seek goodness. Who know about and look up to great human beings like Ghandhi and MLK, rather than spongebob squarepants or the latest pop idol. This is part of my wildly important goal.

To that end, I wish I had a bit more time to focus on learning how to teach. So much of my time is being taken up with what feels like administrative tasks. I feel like I could easily spend half the day teaching and the other half reflecting, reading, and preparing for the next day, and be learning at a super accelerated rate. In my mind I've already started designing a teacher-training course, and this is one of the main elements of it: time to teach, but also time to reflect, to study teaching theory and practice, and not be super stressed out (which my current school is better at than any of the previous schools I taught at). Being over-busy and exhausted, seems to be the norm for both teacher preparatory programs and actual teaching jobs.

I would love to have time to write more of a blow by blow of my learning practice, but right now I don't have the luxury of that reflection time. Such a pity. Focusing too much on teaching first thing, rather than pairing teaching with learning how to teach. I do kind of have that opportunity, with the half days I'm working, but because I've just moved, and because I'm prepping for the summer training and next years teaching and so many other things, I still don't have the time to do this. But I have hope. I think it's not impossible to do this. It's just a matter of managing my time and energy better. I think.

So to end with, I am also working on time management as a spiritual practice. It certainly is. The ability to remain focused on what is essential, to discriminate that, and to let go of sticky, appealing distractions and low priority tasks that are attractive because they give me an easy win... that requires deep awareness and presence and discipline of mind. Ultimately I see that as my adult version of what the kids are struggling with, and I feel it's my duty to walk my talk, doing my version of what I'm asking them to do. And that too is very difficult, and I continually fail at it. But I can feel the failure alchemizing into growth and my eventual success. I've done it enough times to have faith in the process, and that makes the process go faster, because I'm not disheartened by the slow rate of progress.

I think I'll start posting these to facebook as well, since that's the only way people find out about such things, apparently. In case this is the first post you're reading, this is a blog specifically about my spiritual and personal growth musings, and I only post something to it about once a month. It's not specifically aimed at updating people I already know about my life, so it's probably interesting to a smaller audience. But even if nobody reads it (which has been the case thus far) I find it useful, as always, to clarify my thinking by writing it out.

OK, that's this month. One more thing checked off my to-do list ;-)