A Wing East Diaries

Title: It Won't Be Easy: An Exceedingly Honest (and Slightly Unprofessional) Love Letter to Teaching

Author: Tom Rademacher

Date Read: January 13, 2023

Two snaps.

Snapshot of the book

Teaching is a career that suits me– I love the creativity required to plan lessons; I love working with kids, talking to them, helping them, laughing with them; I love the unpredictability of days. I love it. But, it certainly is not easy.

It's a tough paradox to explain to new teachers: Rademacher offers this: "Crappy job, great career." (42) He divides up his 'love-letter' into five parts: Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer, Again. There is a cyclical and predictable cadence to a school year and his book imitates that pattern. It begins in Summer, where he sets up how we prepare mentally and physically for a school year. This section also offers interview tips, as well as how to get along with the grown ups in your school (great advice!)

Fall offers warnings on how to start with kids: from being careful about how we talk about them and with them; and many personal stories to illustrate the importance of understanding the difference between fear and control in a classroom. It is a true skill to find the balance between controlling an environment full of kids and being friends with them. He writes: "It makes sense when you feel like things are going wrong to resort to fear and anger, but the problem isn't that you yell at a kid now: the problem is that in ten years you're going to be really good at it" (p.88). Trust me, that's not anything you want to be good at. Teaching requires conflict: we have to push kids to try hard things, we need them to test their boundaries, to do things that they don't always want to do– that comes with being somewhere in the middle: "What you really want as a teacher is for students to respect you, and real respect doesn't come from who yells the loudest or who sits backwards in a chair and talks about how all other teachers are lame. Respect comes less from anything you will say, and more from how often you listen, really listen, to your students. When you can tune your ear right, they'll tell you exactly what they need from you." (p.90)

The section entitled Winter takes up topics like how to work with technology (like the Internet!)– some teachers and schools want to create tech-free zones (something that is not a thing anywhere else in student's lives) to protect the way they have always taught. Currently many teachers are worried about the capabilities of ChatGPT for the same reason. As a profession, we must be better than that. Our students deserve better too. We have to acknowledge the landscape and context we teach in. Rademacher offers his simple maxim: "I've taken to instituting a new policy in the work involved in my classes. A policy, or a rule, or… I suppose most accurately, a question: Can Google do this?" (p.99). The Internet is a tool that students can access, like those pocket calculators we were warned about. If they have this tool, it is up to us, as teachers, to go deeper and connect to real world problems; not to be defensive that they have found the answers to our worksheets online. He also tackles white privilege, terrible advice, and helping kids advocate for change.

Spring focuses on giving student voice and choice a place in the classroom; how to handle it when bad things happen; and fighting the urge to quit. He ends in Summer Again, where he once again can see the value and joy in teaching: kids.

Rademacher may not be for everyone: he does swear, and he can feel a little full of himself at times: but I think he is pretty transparent and honest (refreshingly so) about who he is; the mistakes he has made, the success he has had, and the insights he has drawn in his decade as a teacher. For me, his advice would be some of the same I would offer a beginning teacher after close to 25 years of doing it myself: remember that kids are humans– with thoughts, feelings, emotions, and an underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex: You are the adult in the room: do no harm and be kind. The learning will follow.

Snapshot of the book in my classroom/my life

Rademacher includes a helpful quiz (albeit tongue in cheek). It made me laugh, but it also resonates. There are always times when a teacher does not feel like a great teacher. Heck, sometimes (especially during a pandemic) we may not even feel like a good teacher. It's really easy to be pretty hard on yourself and think you are a terrible teacher.

Rademacher includes this diagnostic for teachers to determine if they are in fact terrible teachers. As a teacher mentor, I think I'll keep a copy handy for self-assessment and reflection.

SO YOU THINK YOU'RE A TERRIBLE TEACHER: THE TEST

(Check all that apply. You can check more than one.)

CATEGORY ONE

__ I don't care about teaching.

__ I don't care about students.

__ I like making people feel bad, especially young people.

__ I'm thinking about going in to Administration.

Title: Dopamine: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

Author: Anna Lembke, M.D.

Date Read: November 25, 2022

One snap.

Snapshot of the book

One of my favourite podcasts is Armchair Expert. Dax Shepard, and his co-host Monica Padman, interviewed Stanford professor and psychologist Anna Lembke, and Dax made reference to Lembke's book in many, many, subsequent interviews; so many that I was compelled to check it out. The premise is pretty straightforward: we live in a society full of intense stimuli– drugs, food, gambling, shopping, texting, Instagramming… many of which are also conveniently administered via the hypodermic needle of our own smartphones– a portable device full of digital dopamine— and we are out of balance.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the human brain involved in reward processing. High dopamine substances trigger the release of dopamine in our brain's reward pathway. Our brain processes pleasure and pain both in the same place: like opposite sides of a teeter-totter that needs to stay in balance. When you experience a craving (more chocolate, a cigarette, to double-down)– that moment of wanting is your brain's pleasure balance tipped to the side of pain. Too much pleasure leads to pain.

Lembke uses the stories of several of her own patients to illustrate how she worked with them through their addictions to find a healthy balance. She even cops to her own addiction to soft porn novels. It was a good read, but not a great read. I feel like Dax led me astray, and he doesn't do that often.

Snapshot of the book in my classroom

I could see using Chapter Two: "Running From Pain" alongside Neal and Jarod Schusterman's fiction novel, Roxy. This chapter covers the ways in which the paradigm that some amount of pain is healthy (boosting immune and cardiovascular response and expediting healing) has shifted to a massive prescribing of feel-good pills. In addition to widespread use of antidepressants, prescriptions for stimulants (Adderall, Ritalin) have doubled, including in children younger than five years old. Prescriptions for sedatives (Xanax, Klonopin, Valium) are also on the rise, perhaps to compensate for all the stimulants taken. In 2012, enough Opioids were prescribed for every American to have their own bottle of pills. Beyond our running from pain- we can't stand even minor discomfort and so we are constantly seeking to distract ourselves from the present, constantly needing to be entertained (hello, Smartphone). This non-fiction reading would give students relevant background to make sense of the drugs presented as characters in Roxy.

Snapshot of the book in my life

Water, exercise, and fresh air– is my go to prescription for much of what ails me. Lembke backs me up: "…the evidence is indisputable: Exercise has a more profound and sustained positive effect on mood, anxiety, cognition, energy, and sleep than any pill I can prescribe." (p.152). Take your dog for walk. Leave your stress on a yoga mat. And drink lots of water.