Beginning Again, with Trembling

I've shared before on this blog how much I love the rhythms of the academic year, with beginnings, middles, and ends. We are at the middle of the 2018-19 academic year right now...which means a new beginning as well. Today is the first day of the Spring semester here at Dordt--the last semester of "Dordt College" as we will become "Dordt University" as of May 13 of this year.

I love new beginnings. They also scare me a bit, as I confessed to my students in Introduction to Education this morning. I'm always anxious about meeting up with new students, but in a positive way--I think--if that makes any sense at all? The newness is so full of possibility, of promise. And I'm anxious that I might screw it up somehow, I guess.

Serenity: Dealing with Difficult People

It's a fact of life that teachers have to deal with difficult people. It comes with the territory: we aren't working with cars on the assembly line; we are dealing with human beings with their own thoughts, emotions, and plans.

Every group of students I have ever taught included two or three "knot-heads." You know, those difficult kids who--either by nature, or by design--seemed to conspire to make it difficult on me. Every once in a while, you get a group with eight or nine knot-heads...that's fun too! ("There aren't enough corners to spread them out!")

Sometimes it isn't the kids at all. Sometimes it's the parents. I've had a few classes in my time as a teacher where I've thought, "I wish this was a boarding school...then I would only have to work with the kids, and not deal with these parents!" We sometimes joke about helicopter parents, but this can be very dispiriting as a teacher.

Unfortunately, sometimes the difficulties aren't in the students or the parents, but the colleagues or administrators that make your life rough. Colleagues who seem to be out to thwart your innovative idea, administrators who give you just enough rope to hang yourself...talk about sucking the joy right out of the classroom!

And that doesn't begin to touch the pressures from society: people who decry teachers as lazybones, people who think unionized teachers are just out for more money, politicians who pass laws that put incredible burdens on teachers in the name of "raising standards" without really understanding what the job is like...all of these can make the already demanding profession all the more difficult.

There are days when I think all teachers need to pray the serenity prayer attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

Don't we all need a little more serenity, a little more peace in our lives?