As we head into online learning, I’ve been ruminating on our new normal in the Covid-19 world. How can I ensure the continuity of content and community? I recently read Derren Brown’s Happy: Why More or Less Everything Is Fine and found many of his lessons from the Stoics and Epicureans to apply to the present and especially to my classroom. This is where we are, and we can’t change our current circumstances, so let's look at a couple of lessons from the Ancient Greeks and see if they might help us through these choppy waters. My next few blogs will all touch on a connection from Brown’s text or one of the ancient philosophers.
“Most of what happens in life is entirely out of your control, and while blind self-belief might disguise that fact for a while, it will eventually prove an anemic opponent to brute reality” Derren Brown
Teachers thrive on control. We even measure much of our success on mastery of controlled variables. Classroom management. Content. Curricular design. So what happens when we are thrown into the unknown and lose so much of that control? Panic. Anxiety. Fear. I know that I start spinning. Our go-to lessons and activities probably won’t work in the same way now. Synchronous learning environments challenge the simple, audible “mmhm” of the classroom: the universal student signal of engagement and understanding. It’s our teacher cue that they “got it” and we can move on. Now, we even lose that simple “mmhm” behind muted microphones. This is going to be an adjustment.
In my first couple of years teaching, I had to come to terms with accepting what was and was not within my control. Shaking the anxiety of a disruptive student and not personalizing inattention was incredibly tricky. It took time to accept that adolescents carry so many distractions throughout the day. As teachers, we can’t control that text or snap received in the hallway before class that supercharged their underdeveloped prefrontal cortices. As we enter our virtual classroom spaces, there are bound to be more of these distractions. Since we are now physically separated from our students, this understanding of control is critical and even more challenging to accept.
Derren Brown furthers the Stoic principle of control and offers us direction. He says, “If we ignore everything over the other side of that line – everything that we do not control, everything other than our own thoughts and actions – we tend to remove anxiety and even achieve more success. And by reminding ourselves, as and when pressures arise, to distinguish between the component parts of what we can and cannot command, we start to live our lives in the glow of tranquillity.” As a teacher, this is liberating. If we consider that “line” as our physical computer screens, we can then focus our attention on preparation and shed the anxieties of our new educational medium. This isn’t a time to be hard on ourselves. This will be different. Our measures and cues for student engagement will also be different, and that’s ok. What we can control is our preparation and how we establish the new norms for our online academic spaces.
Each morning, I plan on taking five or ten minutes to breathe and think intentionally about my day while visualizing my classes and interactions as moments to acknowledge what is and is not in my control. Once I identify what I can control, I can better prepare and then let go of what I can’t.
In my next post, I’ll be looking at Epictetus’ quote, “What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about these things,” and how I’m applying it to my online teaching transition.
Brown, Derren. Happy: Why More or Less Everything Is Fine. Corgi Books, 2017.
Photo by Shifaaz Shamoon on Unsplash