The Honeymoon Is Over...

This week my family friend and NPR Education writer, Meg Anderson, wrote this important article about the challenges of being a new teacher at this time of the school year.  In it, she identifies October and November as times where many new teachers hit a point of despair upon realizing how hard it is to be a good at the job.  This article really resonated with me and even though I am in my tenth (!!) year of teaching, I found many of the new teacher fears still ring true for me.  

In the article, Anderson interviews Roxanna Elden, author of See Me After Class, who states, 

"Lots of jobs are hard," says Elden, "but with teachers, it's like, 'Wow, I'm hurting kids because I'm as bad as I am.' You have these exaggerated thoughts like, 'Well, what if I break my leg? I'd get three weeks off.' "

I can't tell you how much I identify with these sentiments.  I look back on my first year of teaching with gratitude that I (and everyone around me) survived it.  I am sure that I cried every week if not multiple times a week.  I commuted an hour to and from my first job and would regularly entertain the crazy thought of how maybe just a little car accident could net me a lot of time off of work.  I had so much anxiety about school that I instituted a policy that my husband (then boyfriend) and I would go to a movie every Sunday night just so that I could take my mind off of going back to school on Monday morning.  It was bad, guys.  

This week my husband was talking about some of the people he works with (Jon has been a project manager for a department called Educational Innovation at UW-Madison for almost a year).  He kept describing all of these "education people" as "just like you, Bryn...so emotional".  After hearing this a few times, I asked for clarification to ensure that "so emotional" was not intended to be disparaging.  He replied that what he meant to say is that he has never worked with people who genuinely care so much about the work they are doing.  Most people don't care about their work like you guys do, he said.  

So... when you care a lot, I guess you end up crying a lot.  At least this has been true for me.  

This week I was reading the book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami.  In his discussion of running and writing he states, "If something's worth doing ,it's worth giving your best - or in some cases beyond your best."  At my school, it feels like the honeymoon is over and the disillusion phase has set in.  I ran out of the curriculum that I created this summer, meetings are piling up on top of one another, and there is never going to be enough time to get caught up.  The combination of caring a lot and giving beyond your best is what I think is so hard about teaching.  

Considering all of this, and despite the many ups and downs that I have been through, I am glad to be teaching.  If I could go back and talk to myself as a new teacher, I would share a lot of the reassurances posted in the response to Meg's article.  There is solidarity in knowing that it is a challenge for everyone.  There is comfort in knowing that it gets better.  

So that is what I want to remind myself in this October/November/Post-honeymoon/Disillusionment Phase of the school year: You care about this a lot.  It is worth giving beyond your best.  It will get better, but in the meantime, it is ok to cry.

Thanks, Meg Anderson, for inspiring this important discussion and congrats on a well-written and powerful article!  

The Happiness Seminar

When I was working on my masters degree I had the opportunity to take a summer school class with Carl Grant who invited me to work on an article with him.  At the time, he was thinking and writing about education through his lens as a grandfather and was interested in what school was teaching his grandchildren about living a good life.    In the years since my class with him, I have circled back to Grant's question many times and wondered what the students in my classes are learning about living a good life.  This was one of the questions that inspired me to create The Happiness Seminar.  

Another inspiration was Gretchen Rubin's book The Happiness Project which I have probably talked with all of you about at some point.  The Happiness Project is Rubin's memoir of a year's worth of implementing research-based resolutions designed to make herself happier. In the beginning of her book, she makes it clear that she isn't an unhappy person, but, like many of us, she knew that she was not savoring and enjoying the great moments in her life to the best of her ability.  This is something that really resonated with me and I loved following Rubin through her journey to find bits and pieces that would fit for me.  

At some point last year, I started thinking about what a happiness project would look like for a young person.  How powerful could it be to learn - as a teenager - that through intentional activities you can increase the amount of happiness you experience?  What resolutions would a high school student make to help them become happier?  

Thus... in the beautiful combination that is big questions about our students and big questions about ourselves... The Happiness seminar was born.


I have two sections of The Happiness Seminar this term and we started out the year learning about work in the field of Positive Psychology which studies how people can cultivate the best within themselves in order to live their best life.  We began by watching Happy and reading from The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky.  While students loved the movie - it is a great intro to the concepts   and areas of study within Positive Psychology - the book was not as big of a hit.  While The How of Happiness was successful in getting students comfortable with the research, it isn't written for young people and several students complained about the format.  I hope to teach this seminar again in the future, and between now and then, I will be in search of additional resources.  

(A slight digression: while it is amazing to be able to teach classes with such out-of-the-box topics like Happiness or Haiti, it is often really challenging to find texts and other resources that are appropriate for high school students.  I will circle back to this point in a moment.)

After familiarizing themselves with research and reading about experiments and results, my students began their own action research projects in which they designed happiness activities they will engage in over the course of five weeks.  They are two weeks in and gathering data through multiple means on their experience of activities that include regular exercise, practicing meditation, writing letters of gratitude, monitoring flow experiences, and savoring joyful memories through painting.  At the end of the five weeks, they will review the data, determine what activities - if any - made them happier, and communicate their findings as a research paper, public speaking presentation or mathematical model.  I am excited and curious to see what they find.

In the second half of our term, we will move from what makes individuals happy, to what makes communities happy.  Students will be studying communities around the world that rank highly in terms of overall happiness.  We will also study our local community - CSCS, Middleton, and Cross Plains - to see what we can learn about how happy our communities are and what could be done to make them happier.  

Over the summer I listened to the audiobook of Gretchen Rubin's newest book Better Than Before.  In it, she talked about correspondences with readers and it occurred to me that I could write to her and tell her about my class.  I sent her an email telling her about the curriculum I was creating and my hopes for my students.  I also shared the challenge of finding materials on this subject that are written for young people.  I was thrilled to receive a reply from Rubin with some resources and a request to keep her posted about our progress.  Maybe our work will inspire her next book... Happiness in High School?  I will keep working on title ideas.  

What I like the best about this seminar is that it represents one of the things I think is most important about the design of our school: students are able to engage in reading, writing, research, math, and challenging content while learning about a topic that improves their lives and their communities and - hopefully - teaches them something about living a good life.