Advice to New Teachers: Develop Your Skills
This is the latest installment in my series of Advice to New Teachers, which is really advice to teachers in general. If you missed the first essays, you can find them here.
I went to college with a Special Forces veteran whose service included jumping out of planes. He told me that after a certain point, the human eye does not accurately perceive distance. When jumping out of a plane, one typically jumps from a height that is beyond this natural threshold. (I can’t remember what the number is, nor have I fact-checked this story.)
So, while voluntary, mid-air exits from perfectly good aircrafts are unnatural acts for anyone to make, he said that one rarely jumps from a height where the reality of their situation is perfectly clear. He went on to tell me that in the Special Forces they trained at the point where the eye could still perceive the distance to the ground. He explained, “If you train while you are scared as shit, knowing full-well how far you are from the ground, when the time comes to jump and you are under the pressure of the mission, you will not be under the pressure of the jump.”
He had similar stories about underwater training, the point of which is to train under stress to bring raise one’s default responses. Evidently, everyone regresses to some mean. We win some and lose some, we have highs and lows, and yet, within the ups and the downs, we have a basic level of competence which functions like a personal default setting. Under stress, most people will regress to that mean; they will go to their default setting.
He and I were attending a small, liberal arts college with an emphasis on experiential learning, process over product, and where subjective experiences were often valued over objective skills. And, while this lovely human who had trained at the threshold of fear and in the throes of an activated survival instinct for many years ended up at a hippy, liberal college with an interest in crystal healing for a reason, he still struggled a bit with the learning culture of the school. We talked about his frustration a lot.
But what, you must be asking, does this walk down memory lane have to do with teaching yoga?
First of all, I tell this story in teacher training all the time because no one teaches at their best in teacher training. I had been teaching over ten years and training teachers for a few years myself when I attended a weekend teacher training with two senior Iyengar yoga teachers. And, surprise, surprise— I taught like shit. I really did. I felt awkward, anxious, and self-conscious. My classmates didn’t know what my instructions meant, I was unfamiliar with the poses they gave me to teach, and the instructors were particularly zealous. As you can imagine, I spiraled into self-doubt and shame, which was not pleasant at all.
Much to my surprise, when I returned home to my regular classes, my teaching had significantly improved. The flustering and fumbling in all the drills we did that weekend worked even though I had been a far-from-impressive specimen of teaching throughout the workshop. The training was the equivalent of jumping out of an airplane knowing exactly how high up in the sky I was. Let me be clear—teaching unfamiliar poses in a forced situation in front of my peers did not bring out my best teaching. However, the experience developed a new capacity in my skills.
I always tell teachers-in-training to give themselves permission to suck in teacher training so they can show up in class and be great. Best, I think, is to make as many mistakes as you can in teacher training while you are paying to be trained, rather than trying to be impressive in training and making your mistakes when people are paying you for class. It’s a weird logic, but, it’s what I’ve got. (Keep in mind, not everyone likes teacher training with me.)
So there is teacher training.
And then there is being a new teacher.
When we begin teaching yoga, we are like my friend— jumping out of a plane knowing exactly how far we are from the ground. In the beginning we can’t fill up the time in class. Within five years, we always run out of time. In the beginning, we think the student who isn’t smiling hates us, the class, or both. Over time, we realize that our experience of a person’s facial expression is not as accurate an indicator of someone’s internal state as we once thought it was. I could go on. My point is that, while the early days of teaching can be tough, they are the training period where we are developing our skills under pressure. Developing our skills as a teacher is what allows our teaching to become reliable.
I mentioned in a previous entry that we are going to “teach through it all.” The only way I have been able to teach through it all is by relying on the basic skills of teaching— sane sequences, simple themes, clear instructions, active commands, observable actions, etc. I can teach a solid class feeling happy, sad, scared, or mad. I can “verb your body part in a direction” in a heart-breaking election, a pandemic, a death in the family, with no money in the bank, and with a marriage on the rocks. Of course, I prefer teaching when I feel happy, inspired, in touch with my beauty, and with hope for humanity in my heart, but I do not require any of those things to deliver a solid class. Notice I am saying solid class, not the “best class ever” or the “most inspirational class ever” or any such thing. If I keep my skills up, I default to decent under pressure— whether that pressure is my internal state, the state of the world, a personal crisis or a political one.
And here is the other cool thing—after a cycle of teaching under stress, I am generally at a new level. Not only did I default to decent, but I revisited the threshold of discomfort, trained under pressure for a while, and came out stronger and ready to serve the next mission.
That’s what I have for today.
More soon.
Also, please note, that times come for all of us when we can’t teach and when we should not show up for others. The principle I am illustrating is not meant to criticize the need for breaks, time-outs, regrouping, and the mature capacity to acknowledge, and respond to, our limits.