Tag: love

Giving and receiving

Teaching is absolutely a profession of giving. We give our time, we give our energy, we give attention, we give advice and guidance, we give compassion, we give support.

All of this giving is why teaching is so tiring. Teachers, at the end of a long week or a semester or a year often feel, literally, exhausted. It feels like there is nothing left to give.

But, to our students, even when we feel exhausted, we continue to give hope, we give purpose, and we give love. And in the giving of hope, purpose, and love, we receive in return, a deep, profound sense of meaning in our lives.

That’s why we keep bouncing back up and doing it all again.

Home is perspective

There’s a line that Shaun White, professional skateboarder, snowboarder and Olympian recites to himself before a major run at an event:

“I’m here, I’m going to try my best, and I’m going to go home, and my family’s there.”

Most of us aren’t Olympic athletes but we know that feeling of ‘being at the top of a run’. We know what it feels like just before we ‘drop into’ something at work or at home that matters. Winning feels great, applause is nice, being overlooked hurts and failing sucks.

But humans always see outcomes through a lens, a perspective. And when we change lenses or shift perspective, the world looks different, the world is different.

When we remember that, at the end of the day, despite everything, we go home to our family and our ‘tribe’; our wins are tempered by humility and gratitude. And our failures are cushioned by hope and love.

Fear or love

If you are one of the 100 million people in the world who have already seen the  penultimate episode of the final season of Game of Thrones, you will know that the dragon queen does a pretty good job of crudely summarising human motivation theory. To galvanise the people, she says, there are really only two options: fear or love.

[Spoiler alert!]

She chooses: fear.

Whilst, unlike the dragon queen, educators don’t have fire-breathing dragons, we do have other powerful tools available including: tests, exams, competition, ranking systems, humiliation, shame, punishments, failure, calls home, exclusion, detention, judgment.

Importantly, not all of these are inherently fear-inducing or, even, necessarily unpleasant. There are potential positive benefits from formal assessment, for example. But they can, and often do, leverage fear.

When we use these tools as a form of coercion, to generate compliance or obedience, we weaponise their potential to produce: ‘consequences’. And the mechanism underpinning the use of ‘consequences’ as a motivator, threat or deterrent is: fear.

For an educator, like it was for the dragon queen, fear is a choice.

The other alternative is love. That can be a harder choice – often requiring much greater levels of skill, patience, acceptance, nuance, time, respect, relationship, support, and care.

[Spoiler alert!]

But when we choose love instead, we choose a completely different form of education – one with a very different ending than an education fuelled by fear.