As I walked through a torrential downpour to move back into my campus office last week, I realized that I’ve been at what I consider my “new” teaching position for five years now. It felt like a big risk at the time to leave behind something I knew to leap into the unknown, also during a monsoon rain. But my past self did a great job recognizing that this transition had the potential not only to make me a better teacher, but also a better human.
After five years, I’m not sure that I have an exact answer to what being a better human actually means, but I have a sense of the ways in which I’ve grown. During this time, I learned that I have a lot more patience than I ever thought — or demonstrated previously. I see it in two specific ways. The first is working with a team of people who are both innovative and kind. I’ve worked in many work-fast, break-things environments, and there’s something special — and calming — about working with deliberate people who consider actions and consequences with equal weight. Patience here comes from knowing that eventually we will get to the right decision, or at least a right-at-the-time decision that we will revise later.
The second is the patience I have when working in a classroom with 30 18-year-olds who all have different lives and dreams. A recent content creator on Instagram noted that all teachers walk into a classroom “taking the temperature” of each student every class period several times a day. Noticing when someone attends but is withdrawn is just as important as noticing who is not in class and as important as noticing who is participating. I am quite literally on my toes for most of every day. I also joke that I have completely lost my ego these past 11 years of teaching, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing anymore.
I had little patience throughout my life, but perhaps none so much as the impatience I felt for myself and where I was in my life. The messages that got stuck in my head (and honestly, some are still there today) all revolved around having not “arrived” yet. It could be succeeding in my career or growing out of an ugly duckling phase, to not being informed enough about world events. The drive to settle my life into some semblance of order and success reminds me of the movie titled “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” The title itself is enough of a descriptor, but I also get lost in the existential donut crisis. What happens when a hole is there on purpose, not meaning to be filled? Or what if the hole decides to have its own identity separate from the donut? Is my ego the missing donut hole or the donut itself?
There’s a kind of glee writing this now because I have the time, and the patience, to wonder and wander through this question.
My friends have shown me an extraordinary amount of patience since I became a teacher. They listen as I tell stories about class discussions and my latest conspiracy theories class. After many minutes holding the floor at any gathering, I look around and notice that I’ve been talking about teaching perhaps a bit too long — but not as long as I could talk about my cat, Stuart. Maybe it’s the love my friends have for me that helps them be more patient with my ramblings. I’m just so proud of the work I do and the humans I get to spend time with every day that it’s hard not to include them in absentia.
After the convocation at our local university this morning, suffice it to say that we will need to have a lot more patience in the coming year. As the university faces everything from budget concerns to reaccreditation, we are being asked to continue supporting excellence in the classroom and on campus overall. This means something different to each of us, but for me it will be continuing to show up as the most patient version of myself I can be despite the pressures and stresses of working in the field of education anywhere today. I’m trying to be patient with legislators who decrease our funding or with national policies that affect a student’s ability to pursue their education. I even try to be patient with people in our country who don’t see the value of education.
I keep looking for the one thing that might bring some of these folks back to our corner to support each students’ education aspirations. This is when patience is a difficult proposition. I’m impatient with people who don’t understand the long-term ramifications of not supporting education. And it is difficult to ask students every day to be patient as we try to fix what is broken all around us. How long must they be patient for?
