Mindfulness

The reading for this week was practical and useful. Despite the fact that I have been teaching for some time, I found the tips and advice outlined here to be well worth remembering as I gear up for teaching a freshman writing class. One section I liked in particular was the section in Chapter One called, “What You Should Be Thinking after Class.” I thought it was a nice tie-in to what we were discussing in the mindfulness seminar last week. (You know – don’t get too hung up on the past, nor the future, come back to the present)

Some lessons go well and some lessons don’t - and that seems to be the way things work. I’ve seen fellow instructors get real high emotionally when things worked well, and I’ve seen them cry when they didn't, really cry. I think the advice in the book to sort of roll-with-the-punches is sound and healthy: “a bad class session does not make a bad course.”

This is easy to say but hard really to put into practice. Can you really imagine walking out of a class that went poorly and not being upset by that? Can you have the presence of mind to extract the productive lesson from the experience and not dwell on the negative, destructive, critical, and fault finding side? It is my observation that a lot of teachers are real good at blaming and criticizing themselves in unproductive ways when class plans don’t work out in practice. With this in mind, I think the advice to “be kind to yourself and to remember that you are still learning” to be sound advice. I think it is a mindset that we would all do well to develop through a kind of mindfulness practice.