To be honest, I feel like there’s been an uptick in the number of negative experiences going on around me lately. I’m not talking about the things that make it into the national or international news. Not politics. In the last week, right here around me, the following have happened to students that I know:
- The unexpected death of a close family member
- A life-threatening illness that led to withdrawing from classes indefinitely
- A sick parent that needs the student to take over the family business
- An armed robbery
- A car break-in
- An act of violence that was racially or religiously motivated
- An act of sexism during a job interview
These things happened this week to people I know.
Fixating.
If we fixated on these events, we’d find the world to be a pretty gloomy place. But if we fail to address these issues, we risk making the world a gloomy place for the people experiencing them directly.
How do you process?
Our culture moves pretty fast. School is the epitome of this: we have a 14-week schedule. We can’t stop. We can’t take a day or week off. We started on January 14, we took a pre-planned week off March 4th, and we’ll stop on April 29. If something happens to you along the way, you had better figure out how to process and keep moving.
Baked-in Empathy
First, I’m issuing a challenge to my colleagues: eliminate 10% of the content from your course. As one of my favorite quotes says,
“The job of an educator is not to cover material, it is to uncover it.”
-Richard Felder
Make room in your plans for the unexpected. They may happen to you. They may happen to your students. Wouldn’t it be amazing if you had the flexibility to respond with empathy?
Optimism as a Practice
Second, to everyone: optimism is a choice, not a predisposition. When things happen that don’t align with our preferences, we feel pain. Sometimes we’re wounded deeply. I’m not here to question the “right and wrong of it” or the injustice. I’m wondering how a person can dust themselves off and move on.
Two ideas:
- Seek counseling. Our society seems to have created a stigma around mental health treatment. If my kidney hurts, I go to a medical professional for treatment. No one thinks less of me, and I have a spare if the kidney that’s bothering me fails altogether. You have one brain, and it is capable of being damaged in many different ways. Seek treatment from a professional, and be proud that you had the courage to do so.
- Cultivate optimism. Pause for a moment and realize how astonishing it is that the sun came up today. We’re on a tiny rock floating around the vastness of the cosmos. At any instant, a life-ending asteroid could smash into us without warning (turns out they’re hard to spot). But it didn’t. We woke up and got to experience today, in all its richness.
Bad things happen to us all. That’s what you get when you’re wired to have preferences, passions, and love. Things won’t always go the way we want them to. You can let the experience close you off, or you can learn and grow.
I think my optimism comes from my expectations. I expect people to do the right thing, and they usually do. When they don’t, I wonder if they’re alright, not why they’re trying to hit my stuff. I define success as learning. Regardless of the outcome of any situation, I can learn something. Which means I can succeed.
It sounds cliche, but look for the good. It’s there.
I have a lot of thoughts in reaction to this post, mostly along the lines of, “It’s refreshing to hear a professor make an effort to care.” Which isn’t to say that there aren’t that many empathetic professors, but I think many times that empathy gets lost in their efforts to cover required course material. So I appreciate your challenge for professors to cut 10% of their content. When budgeting money, it makes sense to plan for unexpected problems/expenses; it makes sense to do the same with budgeting class time.
I also want to say, thank you for promoting the idea of seeking help for mental health issues. It DOES take courage to find help. As someone who struggles with depression/anxiety, I know that I have only been able to become my best self after seeking treatment. For a long time I was afraid that maybe I wasn’t working hard enough, but it turns out that having mental health problems makes it harder to work “hard enough,” and harder to handle even small road blocks.
I hope your message reaches people who need to hear it; it can be difficult to be a student, but it’s something we can all get through, if we approach it the right way. Thank you for writing this, and thank you for being such an inspiring person!
Thank you for the many kind words, and for sharing about your experience! The analogy to money is very helpful.vI’ll have to start using that.
Also, I think it’s important for people to hear some of the thoughts and doubts you were having – this is how we can help make sure that people know they aren’t alone. Keep taking care of yourself, and keep sharing your experience!