The Hardest Part of Being a Teacher? Do Your Own Work First.

The hardest part of being a teacher is the moment when a student triggers something in you that is not reconciled. 

Here’s what I mean by that. I’ll tell you a quick story. 

Some months ago I sat with a practice of therapists. It was their weekly staff lunch meeting where they’d share a meal, all gather together, and consult one another on issues they were experiencing with clients. At this lunch was a young intern, just starting out her career. When the talking stick got to her, she said something to this effect. 

“I’ve got a client who has brought up a lot of stuff that’s actually hard for me to talk about personally, like in my own life. What do you do in those moments.”

Around her sat a room of wizened and much more experienced professionals. Slowly they began to advise her with the kind of gentleness that you would expect from… well… a room full of mental health professionals. But what really struck me as an uninitiated observer was the fact that every single one of these men and women counseling (pun intended) this young padawan said the exact same thing:

You need to do your own work first. 

The most important part of being a therapist, they told her, was having a therapist. If you aren’t healthy, you aren’t going to be able to help other people get healthy very easily. If you yourself have big parts of your life that are rife with pain and anxiety, you won’t be able to be a professional and stable presence to someone who wants to explore those areas in their own lives. 

You need to do your own work first.

The same is true of teaching. 

I was once told that command of the material is the primary classroom management strategy, and that is surely true. The work of being a teacher has everything to do with knowing and loving your material. On top of that, it has everything to do with being well prepared – showing up to class with a compelling plan that lets these young folks know “we are going somewhere together. We have work to do.” Then, of course, there is the art form of knowing your students, recognizing their individual needs and preferences and doing your best to figure those into all that planning you’re doing with those lesson plans and the material which you know expertly.

That is all hard. I know. 

But to be honest, this is where I rarely see my colleagues fall short. It’s a lot of work, maybe more than anyone can do expertly on every single day of every single week of an entire career. It is, however, something that I see teachers do routinely with passionate expertise. 

No, the harder place is more human, more emotional, more subterranean. The harder part is when this noble calling of education brings us to situations that prick or pulverize the places in our own souls that are, in one or another way, stuck. 

I’ll give you a genuinely hypothetical example. 

You can imagine a teacher in class who has recently made a new fashion choice. Say, blue suede shoes. And you can imagine that a number of their colleagues and even a few of the kids might say, “Nice kicks, Mr. B.” It’s all going smashingly well.

Now imagine there’s that one kid. He already does not have a great reputation with the faculty. When Mr. B has his back to the classroom up at the board he can hear with his wolf-like teacher senses that a wave of snickering laughter is spreading across the back row of desks, emanating from that one kid. 

As it goes, this cuts Mr. B. Even if he doesn’t know what that one kid said, he’s strongly suspicious enough that that little monster (he begins to think to himself) is making fun of me from the back of the room. And now Mr. B gets a bit hot under the collar, flush in the face. He is hyper-aware of himself and feels that brutal sensation of exposure. 

What is he to do? 

Well, hopefully Mr. B won’t do anything unprofessional. He won’t fly off the handle or say something he’ll regret. Hopefully Mr. B won’t overreact, even in a small way. 

My deepest hope of all is that Mr. B will have a way of processing this small moment so that it doesn’t go into a growing pile of other small, unkind, possibly-imagined moments that lead him to give up on that one kid. 

Why doesn’t Mr. B feel this way at all though? How does a too-quite ripple of laughter get under his skin and in his head? 

Well… Mr. B is a human being. Like all of us, he carries at least a bit of the shame that cannot be avoided in childhood or adolescence. He couldn’t have avoided it and neither can you. We all carry around the joys, but also the weights of our own particular stories. The body keeps the score (shoutout Bessel van der Kolk) of our developments, traumas, shames, handups, disappointments, aches, pains, and regrets. We’ve all got them. 

The difference between teachers and, say, neurosurgeons is that neurosurgeons don’t have to return every day to the scene of the crime of their growing up years. They don’t have to re-meet the archetypes of bully and nerd and theatre kid every day. They get to step into a professional world where they can avoid the triggers of their earlier years and at least pretend that all that is behind them. 

Not so with teachers. We go back, every day, to the place where our younger years happened. And the hardest part of that is when the halls where we teach suddenly become the halls where we learned… when our learning wasn’t that pleasant. 

Look, I’m not trying to paint too bleak a picture. All I’m trying to do is be honest about the fact that the hardest part of teaching is the moments when unreconciled emotional pain from our own childhood or adolescence is re-triggered by an event in our place of work. 

So what do we do? 

You have to do your own work first. 

I’m sorry to say this because I know how much work you have to do already. I know about all the lessons planning and the coaching and the dorm parenting and the advising. I really do. 

But I have also come to see that beneath all of that there needs to be a healthy individual who has decided to take up the lifelong task of coming home to themselves. Someone who has decided to do their own work. 

So do your own work. 

Go to therapy. Read about the psychology of shame. Talk to your friends. Tell your story. Go to church (sorry, couldn’t help myself). Learn about teen neuropsychology. Become friends with your pain. Come home to yourself – it will help you give your students a home too. 

Peter Hartwig is Chaplain at Christ School in Arden, NC and a graduate of St. Anne’s-Belfield School in Charlottesville, VA. He received his B.A. in Religious Studies & Classics from the University of Virginia. He then went on to receive graduate degrees from the University of Cambridge (Master of Philosophy) and Princeton Theological Seminary (Master of Divinity). His writing has appeared in Comment Magazine, the Hedgehog Review, and Earth & Altar. Peter’s articles for “The Classroom” address a range of education topics and we couldn’t be happier to have his contributions.