Exhale. Relax. Regroup.

Sometimes we all just need to stop. We need to take a moment to look at what we’re doing and pat ourselves on the back for being where we are. Regardless of how things have gone in the last few weeks or terms, we are doing good work. We contribute to developing the potential of those individuals who happen to wander into our teaching spaces and in ways both great and small, we touch lives.

It’s easy to forget all that when you’re drowning in marking, when it feels like the end of the term is a thousand years away and you swear that if you find yourself working after midnight again you are going to have yourself committed somewhere with padded walls. We all mess up. We all have lessons that end with us thinking ‘that was BAD’ and we have all graded tests which have left us thinking ‘I’ve failed, I’ve failed. They know NOTHING!’

Regardless of how much you feel as though you’ve failed, you haven’t. The very fact that you care, that you are upset by what you feel is inadequacy shows that you are very, very far away from being a failure.

Still, I know my words are competing with loud inner critics who know all your weaknesses and know just how to get under your skin and so at times when you feel it’s all too much and you can’t go on with it any longer, I have these four steps for you:

1. Cut the criticism

We all love to criticise ourselves. We set ourselves standards we wish to achieve and when we don’t get it 100%, we’re devastated, frustrated or just plain angry. Remember, your inner critic is often an unfair one. I don’t advocate comparing oneself to others, because I think this brings on personal destruction. What I believe in strongly is that if you can look yourself in the mirror (a worthwhile practice in itself) and say honestly, ‘I did my best,’ then you have won. Your best is all you need to give to be wonderful.

2. Learn from the mistakes

If you’ve not yet watched ‘Meet the Robinsons’ from Disney, do yourself a favour. There is an amazing scene in which the protagonist’s failure is applauded and he gets upset. One of the other characters responds by saying, ‘Failure is good. From failure, we learn. From success, not so much.’ I agree wholeheartedly.

3. Write a pick-me-up to yourself

On a day when you’re feeling fantastic and on top of the world, write yourself a letter. Tell yourself why you love what you’re doing, why you want to keep on doing it and offer yourself words of encouragement. Yes, you will probably cringe when you eventually read it, but you know what, it will lift your mood anyway.

4. Tomorrow is another day

Scarlett O’Hara was right. There will be days when it will all go to pieces. Your students won’t respond, or an idea you thought was amazing will fall flat. The internet will crash, photocopiers will jam and your car won’t start. It’s days like this that make us grateful for the wonderful days. Again, that inner critic of yours will hone in on bad days like a fly to manure and you’ve got to learn when and how to listen to it. Sometimes, it’s best just to whistle as you wave the day goodbye and dust yourself off for another go.

You are doing amazing, wonderful, incredible things—even if it doesn’t always feel like it. And when those times strike, remember you’re not alone. 

A sense of style

Wow, these just seem to get tougher every day. My brief is to talk about style and fashion, but I don’t really think that’s all that pertinent to what I want to write about here. Don’t get me wrong, I love clothes and dressing smartly and all the rest of it, but I don’t think this is the forum for that really.

What I have decided to do in a bid to twist this topic to suit my purposes is talk about the art of presentation. It’s kind of related to style, so the link is not quite as obscure as it might seem to be.

One of the difficulties I face on a fairly regular basis is getting students to take pride in their work. I have had so many semi-crumpled bits of scrawl handed to me that I could wallpaper a room with them. I’ve seen students deliver presentations accompanied by slide shows that could not have taken more than 10 minutes to design and I’ve had term projects that are woefully short and not thought through correctly submitted to me.

When I was a student, and in fact even today, I cannot bring myself to hand in something that does not look good. I wrote about worksheet and assignment design a few days ago, and that same mentality applies: it’s not just a case of putting a picture on the page and choosing a funky font to ‘zhoosh’ (wonderful South African word) it up a bit, it means making sure that the picture helps to draw students in and provide a bit of context. The font needs to be appealing, readable and suited to the purpose. If I use colours, they have to work together, there needs to be a sense of blending. If you look at my pages on the web, you’ll see there is at least some sense of aesthetic going on there. Now I’m not claiming to be an expert designer, but what I mean is that I’ve taken time to decide how things work together to create a final product. It was like this in school too.

However, it seems that the majority of students either couldn’t be bothered to do all this work, or they lack the necessary skills to do so. My suspicion is that it’s more the latter than the former. I was never taken through designing an effective PowerPoint presentation or taught how to make a poster appealing. There was a mark for it on the rubric, but no actual teaching ever happened. And that’s a big problem.

My rant here is not just because I’m dissatisfied with lacklustre work, it’s because of the ramifications this has beyond school. Sure, handing in a mucky essay or poster in Grade 9 is not going to mean the end of the world, but beyond the school walls it is. Writing emails in a professional context and being unable to structure sentences coherently or express oneself properly is going to be an enormous handicap, but students don’t know anything about that world and it’s pointless going on about it. The second any person over the age of 20 says, ‘When you’re out of school…’ they’ve switched off, so don’t waste your breath.

I think the solution to getting this to work is a layered one. Firstly, the idea of taking pride in what one is doing needs to be instilled. This can only happen if students buy in to what they’re doing, which brings me to my next point: perceived value. If students feel that what they’re doing is meaningful and has value, then they are more likely to want to put an effort into it. The next layer is incentive, and this one leaves a somewhat bitter taste in my mouth.

I am highly critical of the culture of ‘marks and grades’ that has developed. Any teacher will, at some point in his or her career hear, ‘Is this for marks?’ If you say it’s not, many students immediately lose interest and if they do anything at all, it will be with minimal effort. There’s no incentive to work, you see. Very few students will want to do something without there being some kind of reward, and the line ‘This is going to help you to understand the work,’ doesn’t quite cut the mustard it seems. This culture has been bred from years and years of being graded on just about everything to the point where the grade becomes a currency. Do well, and the teacher will reward you with stickers, or a free lesson, or special privileges and your parents will respond similarly. Don’t get the marks, and it’s extra work, tutors, extra lessons, being punished etc.

This is why when I say students need incentive, I say so with a sense of wariness and reservation. We need to work on moving away from this mentality. Students need to want to work because they can see the value in doing so. One of the suggestions I have here is upgrading aspects of the curriculum which we cling to because of some sense of inherent value these things have. When was the last time you had to write a formal letter to a newspaper complaining about an article? Even if you did write to a publication, I’m pretty sure you sent an email anyway. What I’m getting at here is you need to take the content and move it forward. Yes, it is important for students to know how to write formally and how to deal with an issue in a way that is respectful, but which communicates one’s opinion clearly, but there are so many ways this can be achieved. Getting them to sit quietly and write a letter complaining about the broken gate to the park is hardly going to inspire creative genius. What about sending each student an email from an upset customer and having them draft the response? You can include all the steps that would be involved in the process too. Suddenly the work seems a bit more relevant.

I don’t know if this is the solution, but it’s a solution. Getting students to see the value in what they are doing is sure to increase the likelihood that they’ll put effort into producing work of an excellent standard. And if we teach them how to go about doing this, I’m sure we’ll all see more engaged and thought-through work.

Once we’ve got the basics done, then we can move on to developing each student’s personal style, and that is something really exciting, because it will be helping them to reach their full potential, and isn’t that what this is all about after all?