Ms aposiOpesis

I’m thinking that perhaps it would behoove teachers to be students as often as possible.  Formally, I mean, as we’re always students–we’re always learning from our kids, our peers, our classroom experience–and should be students of life.  I’m talking bona fide, sit-in-a-desk, have homework, students.

I just started my Master’s in late August, and even though college isn’t something new to me (I have a B.A. and a B.S.), I’m learning a lot about what it’s like being a student.  This is the first time I’ve taken long-term classes since becoming a teacher, and it’s quite enlightening.

First and foremost?  I get to see how well I, myself, implement all the study tools I’ve been suggesting or mandating to students all these years.  Review notes each day, use Cornell notetaking, organizing binders, highlighting efficiently, SQ3R text reading, working on assignments over time rather than four minutes before they’re due, effective listening techniques…all of it.

And how am I doing?  Well, averaging them all out?  About a C.  Maybe a C-.

I do very well in listening…I’m one of those people who is horribly, terribly, immensely annoyed with students talking while the teacher or other students are, whether it’s my own classroom or I’m in another’s.  I’ve noticed over the years at teacher in-services that teachers are the worst offenders in this regard–behavior they never would allow in their rooms they partake in regularly, talking to neighbors, carrying on full conversations while a presenter is speaking.  Drives me crazy.  So, in that regard, I’m doing well…and probably annoying classmates by occasionally shushing them when the Prof is trying to talk.

On the notetaking, I’m doing well.  On the daily note reviewing?  Not so much.  For many reasons, none of them reasons that most of my own students couldn’t claim, themselves, which is important for me as a teacher, I believe.

Secondly, it’s a new wrinkle on studenthood that I’m looking at my courses and wondering how I would present the same material, and with which resources, and in what order.  I guess once a teacher, always a teacher; the planning, the assessing, the absolute absorbing, is always with me, just as it is whenever I’m hearing the news or waltzing through my regular blogreading and having “I could use that in class….” moments all the time.

And, thirdly?  It’s damned hard to sit in one place for two hours at a time, even with a little break.  I’m a pacer in my classroom–unless the fibro is biting me big time (which happens, and in which case I’m liable to hurt myself if I move too much as it brings dizziness, too).  I often give my own students “stretch time” even in our 50-minute classes because I hate sitting for that long, and yeppers…it’s not any easier for me these days, which could be the spinal arthritis and two bad discs which I’m also lucky enough to be blessed with.

I do often wear my TENS unit during class for this last reason, which led to yet a fourth reason why teachers should be students more often.  To experience the embarrassment.

I was giving a presentation the other night, and not only did I have to squash a half-hour’s worth of information and slides that I’d worked hard on into ten minutes (don’t ask), but the electrodes from my TENS unit came unattached as I bent for something (were on my lower back) and fell to the floor, still connected to the unit on my waistband.  I had to scoop all the wires up and stuff them in my pocket, while trying to explain it briefly to a classroom full of onlookers who thought, no doubt, that I was Frankenstein.

Which is something far different from when I was a student before…in my younger years, I was not only unable to speak publicly, but if pressed to and something like that had happened?  I would have lost it, completely, never to show my face again.  Now?  Make a joke, move on, whatever.

Being a teacher has also been good for my being a student, you see.

It’s the time of year when I get excited about planning my upcoming year; reflecting on what worked last year and modifying, choosing news stories and texts in some cases, finding new ways to teach the material, revamping what I do and still like.  It’s not stressful because I have time, and since I love organizing–concept organizing, that is, and not, say, closet organizing–it’s fun.

This summer is no different, but I have another item on my agenda.  One that isn’t about teaching, or education, or even my profession at all (although it impacts that, as well as everything else).  It’s about re-integrating my mind and body.

No, I’m not on some new-agey kick (not that I have anything against that, it’s just not me).  I’m not trying to find myself, and it’s not even a midlife crisis (although, come to think of it…).  It’s simply that over the last four years of medical comedy in my life, diagnoses and treatments and surgeries and prescriptions, I’ve lost track of my body.

More than that, I’m realizing that I not only have separated my body from “me” in such a way that it’s a foreign object, but that I absolutely hate this foreign object.  It causes me pain, and frustration, and it won’t do what I tell it to, and it keeps failing, and it interferes with everything I want to do.

I’ve been finding myself, more and more, watching commercials or programs or people in real life doing things that I used to do–simple things–and more and more I find I resent them, and hate my body, because I can’t do that.  Running, walking, canoeing, bending, reading, doing handicrafts.

I’m finding myself using language that highlights this separation, that labels my body a traitor, and I use metaphor that is violent (”I want a chainsaw to cut off these arms right now”).

I’m resentful–angry–over my eyes failing me when I’m an English teacher.  My reading has decreased an immense amount over the last three years or so, and it’s because I literally cannot see well enough to read at times–and it’s becoming more and more common. So many doctors, so many different “solutions”, and none of them have worked.  Meanwhile, my eyes get worse (and I had better than 20-20 vision for all of my adult life until recently).

I’m saddened and betrayed by the miscarriages.

I’m loathing of the autoimmune diseases that are killing parts of my own body, but it’s my own body that’s doing it.  I hate the pain, and I really, truly, hate the fatigue that keeps me from living the way I used to, from working as hard and as much as I used to.

I don’t like looking at myself–these conditions have done their damage on my appearance (weight, skin, etc.)–and all this resentment has built up so that, as Esperanza says regarding her environment vis-a-vis her *potential* at the beginning of The House on Mango Street, I feel like I’m a red balloon tied to an anchor.

And the key point there is that the “I” has nothing whatsoever to do with the body.  Separate entities, working against each other.

So, from discussions with my husband and a good friend–one who’s editing a book by a woman with a very similar journey–I’m realizing that this summer, along with setting up my Moodle courses, and finding a new novel for LA 8, and planning my new classroom, I have to re-integrate myself into a whole.  A flawed whole, granted, a whole with many parts missing and many parts not working properly, but a whole individual.

I need to learn to love this body again, and then perhaps I can heal.  And it’s not going to be easy.

My first steps?

• I am trying to nourish it better.
• I am starting T’ai Chi; I want strength, and I want to trust my limbs.
• I am trying to visualize positivity.
• I am starting acupuncture for the pain and meditation and integration.

And, since I’ll be teaching on overload this upcoming year *plus* going to grad school, I’m thinking now what I can realistically say “yes” to and what I will have to give up; I’m only one person, and one person with limited physical resources.

Of course, at the same time this is happening, I’ve managed another incurable diagnosis (spinal arthritis) to add to the Hashimoto’s, the Fibromyalgia, the Asthma, the (continue long, boring list here).  Also, my incision from a minor surgery on my back a couple of weeks ago has become, as happens often with me (weird immune system I have), infected.

But I’m trying very hard to not resent; accept, find the lessons, and adapt.  The resentment and hatred I’ve been carrying is contributing to the fatigue, I can only imagine, so it’s a mighty fine place to start.

Tags: health