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 For the past nine years I have been doing triathlons, generally they are not super-long, and I always do them pretty slowly. Despite my mediocre finish times, I enjoy the discipline of the training and the challenge of finishing the races, and on a broader level, I enjoy the feeling of pushing through adversity to reach a goal.
It doesn’t take a motivational speaker let alone a teacher to see that there is good material there for me as a longtime educator and now as a graduate student. For example, there are times when I have faced a seemingly insurmountable pile of papers with grades due in two days, and I have wondered if I really could do it or why I want to do it, but then I realize that it is a long, not always comfortable race, and I push through and am thankful for the fortitude to do so.
Then recently, I did a race where the swim, a crazy open water haul from Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay to the shore, was followed by a seven mile run. I had trained well, and it seemed reasonable (in fact, a few years ago, I had done a longer version of the race), but towards the end of the swim I felt like things were not right. When I got out of the water, I was really tired and my equilibrium was way off, but these races are about pushing limits and the transitions between events are always awkward. I figured I just needed to get my legs under me, and I would be fine. So after a brief rest, I trudged on.
A few miles into the run I really knew I wasn’t OK, and I started weaving a bit as I ran. Part of my brain was arguing to turn back, but I kept pressing on. Eventually I couldn’t even walk straight. I flagged some fellow runners to say I needed help and finally was met by race officials and then was whisked away in a SFFD ambulance with dehydration and near kidney failure. So what had gone wrong in my theory of race day and life determination? Was I misguided to believe in the value of convincing myself to carry on in these tough situations?
My first teaching job was in rural Kenya where proverbs were a big part of daily life. “Haraka haraka haina baraka” or “Hurry, hurry has no blessing (or good fortune)” was a common saying. But there was a companion saying which as a native New Yorker I loved: “Ngoja, ngoja humiza matumbo” or “Waiting hurts the intestines.” So which was true? Well, as my Social Psychology professor would say, “The answer is obvious. It depends.”
While the answer is obvious, as teachers (at least as most of the teachers I know who read and write for this journal) we often don’t get the “it depends” part. We often soldier on trying harder to solve things that can’t be solved or taking on more committee work because there is no one else who is funded to do it. We get ourselves into a state that is truly unhealthy, and we know it is, but we continue on.
When I first started teaching there was a woman who worked harder than any other teacher I had ever met before or since. She was forever schlepping around a massive pile of papers, which would get her meticulous and thoughtful feedback. For her, this work was both a service to her students and a validation. She didn’t just carry her Tupperware basin of papers around; she wore it like it was her marathon finishers’ medal, but her race never ended. And, frankly, it always seemed to me to be wearing her down emotionally and physically. She has since retired after a full career, but it always seemed to me that someone needed to tell her to stop. It's not that she needed to stop teaching, but she needed to ease up somehow, to give one fewer paper a month, or write fewer comments sometimes.
Now, some could say that she is not be a great example because she might be the equivalent of the people who run ultramarathons. Maybe, a regular marathon teaching career wasn’t enough; she needed to go 100 miles per race. I’m sure you know some of these people at your school; maybe you are one yourself. They feed off of the masochism of being crushed by the paper pile or serving on every committee or coaching every season, but what about the many others who just get burnt out way too fast, who don’t know how to say no or realize what they are doing to themselves?
As I begin to get more involved in teacher training, I’m not sure how to convey this mixed message. Yes, you need to soldier on. Things will be tough, but at the end of each day or each unit or each year, there is the great pay off of knowing that your have worked very hard for something really worthwhile. But at the same time, you need to know that sometimes you have given yourself or your students too much to do, you signed up for that one extra committee that is going to ensure that your don’t get to exercise the only two days a week you had scheduled to do so, and you know things don’t feel right. It is at those times that we need to be better as professionals at saying, “No, I need to stop. This is too much.”
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