Stoicism for Teachers

I will attempt to share with you now a bit of hard-earned Stoic wisdom learned not from Greek philosophers, but from long years worth of trying with all my power to teach anything at all to twelve-and-thirteen-year-olds. Bear with me, I am not crazy. I am a retired middle school teacher.

*No matter how naturally gifted you are with teaching skills, you have to learn everything about teaching the hard way, trying and failing repeatedly until you get it right, or until the students kill and eat you.*

*The only person whose behavior you can control is you yourself. Student behavior is chaos.*

*While you can’t control student behavior, you can use your behavior to corral attention and lead them towards something that resembles civilized behavior. (But learning how to corral those little piggies can take forever.)*

*You will want to do everything “the easy way” because that is the only way you can reach classroom goals in a reasonable amount of time. Of course, it takes practically no time to learn that there is NO EASY WAY!*

*Most teachers rely on drill and practice, and this is why there are so few excellent teachers. Drill and practice is the most effective way to teach students to hate the subject you are trying to teach.*

*Students learn best in a “Laughing Classroom” where they talk to each other, activities are creative and sometimes loud, and learning becomes fun.*

*Many principals consider “Laughing Classrooms” to be a good reason to punish or dismiss a teacher.*

*Good teaching is a subversive act. Only the people who are supposed to teach or learn really want it to take place in most schools.*

*All of your students will misbehave at one time or another. Some only briefly and very mildly. Others for an endless period of time that you hope ends short of murder.*

*When a student misbehaves and you have to take them into the hallway to yell at them and/or murder them, you secretly tell them that you believe in them, describe the behavior and why it disappointed you, and then describe what they should have done instead. Follow that by asking them if someone else needs to get involved, parents, principal, police, or executioner, or if they would like to go back in the room and try again.*

*Your worst students are the ones who need you the most. You better learn somewhere along the way to love past the ugly.*

*Nothing you will ever do in your career will beat reaching the unreachable and teaching the unteachable. I pray that you will get to experience it at least once. And no one but you and that student will ever know about it.*

Now you can go be a school teacher and be all Stoic like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. And there was no secret code for anything evil in that last one. If you ever experience it, you will know then what I am talking about. Not everything you are proud of doing in life has to get a gold medal on a stage to be worth doing. But if you are a teacher, you already know that.