I have read many self-help books over my lifetime, starting when I was 22. The Way of the Peaceful Warrior (Millman) was the first. Hard to say whether it was my existential crisis that drew me to the book, or the book created or exacerbated the crisis. I loved the book and felt inspired by it. I wanted that kind of intellectual and spiritual awakening.
I also remember thinking I have no Socrates in my life to help me through. My father had passed when I was 19, and I imagined he was my Socrates. I felt very much alone.
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In our culture, and at that time in the late 80s-early 90s, rugged individualism holds sway: you are supposed to know what to do. It’s been inside you all along. You gotta go it alone, figure it out.
I have held these beliefs and they have held me. I am a figure-it-out person and have been for a long time… whether due to early childhood traumas and needing to grow up too fast, or due to a temperament driven to know more, I have always been a seeker. Before college I was driven to get through college. I had a clear goal. But it was fuzzy and fell apart when I lost my Socrates, my father, the one who helped me make decisions. When I graduated from college I was lost. I have been wandering ever since.
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I have periods of knowing what to do, like when I decided to become a teacher. But that never really felt like my calling. It felt more like a necessary step toward giving back, a return to what I knew, the place where I felt driven.
Yet during all the years I was in the classroom I was plagued with questions of purpose and relevance. Kids were hardly interested in analyzing Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima or Sophocles’ Antigone, much less read them. I focused on making the texts relevant to larger human philosophical questions because that’s how I see the relevance. It was a hard sell.
Over time I added choice, teaching genres instead of texts, and having students choose books. I recommended books by writers from many different walks of life, expanding the shoes my students walked in. This helped, but I was dogged by the feeling that even this education, in the way it was designed, didn’t fulfill its purpose…or maybe it did. But it wasn’t my purpose for education. We weren’t making a more informed or literate society in our high school, not really. We weren’t creating more empathy or breaking down oppression. Some kids were engaged and may have felt my attempts, but most were not.
All of my students seemed to hear messages of relevance and purpose from other teachers and maybe parents and certainly our culture: education is just something you have to do to get a good job. Otherwise you will be flipping hamburgers your whole life (and what is wrong with that if it works for you?). You are your grades (A student, B student…failure). These are dangerous messages. [Stay tuned for another essay: the 3 most dangerous messages in education: career, identity, and competition.]
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But I diverge. 40 years of seeking and I don’t feel that much closer to knowing what I am supposed to be doing. Sometimes I think we aren’t ever supposed to know. Or that there is nothing to know.
I do feel passionate about some topics, like what education is really for: to help us live free from oppression, literate and capable of navigating the world, with self-awareness and understanding of humanity. I am passionate about integrating wellbeing into education because it isn’t only for the job.
Yes, it’s ironic that I am currently employed writing CTE curriculum, which is all about career readiness. I do infuse activities that build self-awareness and relationships and meaning and purpose. And I do get to support SEL curriculum that is incredibly meaningful to me.
One reason I like CTE is because it is also focused on DOING. We learn through action.This is a long way to getting to a point I wanted to make about self-help, seeking, and learning.
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Self-help instructions, like all instructions, are only useful when you follow them. This is terribly obvious but somehow lost on most of us: Self-help doesn’t make a difference unless we DO something. In fact, no formal education makes a huge difference unless we do something with what we learn.
And we have to have a good reason to do that something… it has to have meaning and relevance. And we need someone to mentor us, to provide feedback and guidance, to help learn and grow (see Vygotsky’s ZPD). The mentor can be a community– a Socratic circle, a book group, Twitter chats — where learning is the goal. And then it takes practice, failing, learning through iterations, adjusting plans, and trying again.
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I left the classroom because I felt like an accomplice in an unjust system that makes kids unhealthy and unhappy, a system that merely replicates the illnesses of our society. If I have a purpose, it is to work to change that system. But honestly the work is to change myself first: understand how I unconsciously reinforce the system, how I am an accomplice in injustice, and learn not only what needs to change but actually try to change it by doing.
The doing is tricky, though. I will make mistakes, say and do things that might offend and show my ignorance. I am learning that my discomfort is nothing – a small price to pay, and one I can (from my place of privilege) choose. One thing I have going for me is that seeking: my drive to learn, do better, be better, and help others.
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I may not yet know what to do. But I am doing something. Meditating, reading more about anti-racism, and practicing somatic awareness. Reading more self-help books, and trying to put the words into action. And some writing (because that’s something I do know how to do, albeit imperfectly).
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Thanks for reading. I welcome your responses and feedback.
Hey sisters: let me know how y’all are doing. I miss you. <3
