"Bad and Better"

Combating Anxiety in Teaching and Beyond

What if I fail? What if I’m not good enough? – What if I’m not alone?

Again, I have been away from this blog for a long time, but it has been a challenging year. The idea that the first year of teaching is difficult is self-evident and obvious to anyone in the profession. For those outside the profession, I will try to contextualize the challenge: it is like taking a new job, where the bosses have new expectations you may not be used to, you’re in charge of supervising 120 or more employees who often have poor self-control and executive functioning skills, you need to create most of the work you do each day from scratch, you need to assess every employee’s performance on a weekly basis, and then a major part of your performance evaluation depends on government-mandated tests that don’t accurately measure the entirety of what your employees know and can do. All of this means your job is certain to bleed into your nights and weekends, so you will never feel “done” for the day. Add to that that you may have moved away from your hometown, where you were born and where you’ve lived for the last 28 years, as was the case for me. And, yes, you get some time off during the summer, but that’s not a huge comfort when you’ve worked an average of 50-60 hour weeks for nine and a half months and when you need to spend a chunk of the summer preparing for the upcoming year.

Even that description feels overwhelming. To put it more succinctly, I’ll borrow a quote that is often misattributed to Mark Twain: “Describing her first day back in grade school after a long absence, a teacher said it was like trying to hold 35 corks under water at the same time.”

But, while I mean to chronicle some of my challenges, the purpose of this blog post isn’t to complain. For most of my audience, I am assuming the idea that teaching is hard, particularly in the first year, is a given. Instead, I want to talk about the part of my experience that is unusual, or, more specifically, to make it seem less unusual.

I want to talk about my first year through the two lenses: my bipolar II disorder and two books I’ve recently read. Those books were Factufulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World by Hans Rosling and The Better Angles of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined by Steven Pinker. While I wouldn’t say my disorder needs much of a counterweight these days, it still added different, personal context to these books that gave them new significance. Even without an anxiety disorder, our constant and effortless access to events all across the globe can reasonably lead us to see a world full of violence, indifference, cruelty, suffering, and zealotry. In other words, to borrow a quote from a 2016 op-ed by Dennis Prager, published on Townhall.com, “I cannot imagine any thinking person who does not believe the world is getting worse.” The rest of Prager’s argument and sentiment may not be widely shared, but I suspect the quote above resonates with you, at least on some level. I mean to suggest that an anxiety disorder is similar to that Prager quote, but often on a smaller scale. I by no means have an antidote for this problem, but I feel there are two important steps we can take: having (and spreading) more accurate information about the world and being more open with our own struggles, so those facing the same challenges won’t feel so alone or defective. 

Before we discuss those two books, I’ll offer a brief explanation of my bipolar II disorder – at least as I have understood it in my own life and experiences. First, bipolar II doesn’t have a lot in common with the more conventional bipolar I. It still features depressive episodes, but the manic episodes manifest more as anxiety, rather than increased energy and self-confidence (which are the nicer, milder sides of bipolar I manic episodes). Bipolar II also does not operate on the sort of predictable cycles that bipolar I does. But let’s set all of those nuanced distinctions aside. For pretty much all intents and purposes, I have an anxiety disorder. These days, my bouts of depression are rare and mild. My anxiety is what made the challenges of my first year more unusual, but I am writing this blog post because I suspect it’s not as unusual as it may seem. Mental disorders are not easily or frequently discussed, and they are often misunderstood.

For my readers who don’t have an anxiety disorder or do not have a close relationship with someone who does, I will do my best to explain it. It is not just a matter of “worrying” about something. I imagine everyone reading this can picture a time in which you were really nervous or stressed about something. Maybe it was an upcoming job interview, or a presentation, or a date with someone new. Maybe you can picture how it made you feel tense. Maybe it made your muscles tight, or made you sweat. And, perhaps most significantly, it might have made your mind race with “what ifs,” making it hard to stop imagining worst-case scenarios.

An anxiety disorder is like that feeling, but one that never stops and often doesn’t have a clear event or cause attached to it, so it is hard to stop the cycle. Anxiety can make it so you never feel good enough: never prepared enough, never confident enough, never capable enough. In some people, it creates overwhelming perfectionism (something I occasionally experience). All of those feelings aren’t rooted in evidence or reason; they are rooted in “what ifs” and imagined worst case scenarios. An anxiety disorder is fundamentally irrational. I like to think of myself as a logical, thoughtful person, so I can reason through how my anxiety makes no sense, but that does nothing to stop it from coming and possibly consuming me.

One of the best and worst parts of teaching is that every day is different. Moreover, every period – even if it’s the same content – is different. That keeps things from getting too boring or monotonous, but it also creates tremendous fuel for anxiety. Unpredictability creates so much more room for new and different “what if” worries. On top of that, in the words of one of my former principals: “every day in your first year is a first: your first tenth day, your first forty-second day, and so on.” Ask any teacher what it is like to teach during December or May, and they will confirm that every new day can bring new challenges.

However, I want to reiterate that the intent of this post is not to complain. While each day brings new challenges, it can also bring new (and often unexpected) rewards. Early in my first semester, I mentioned off-hand that I have an anxiety disorder. It was really only for the purpose of modeling a topic I might write about in a narrative. I have made it a point in the past to be comfortable mentioning my anxiety disorder around my students in hopes of normalizing it, but I didn’t think much of this particular mention at the time.

Without disclosing too many details, I had a student come to me a month or two later, in the middle of one of my classes, and ask to talk to me in the hall. He was clearly distraught and told me he was struggling with an anxiety disorder that had manifested only recently and was not yet well-managed. I talked with him a bit about what works for me, including giving him a notecard I kept with me that had questions aimed at de-escalating a panic attack. I by no means fixed the hardship he was grappling with, but I hope I helped him feel less alone and less dysfunctional. By the end, he asked for a hug and went on his way. When I say teaching can be rewarding, moments like these are what I think of.

But isn’t this only temporary or hollow comfort if the world is getting worse? Aren’t both that student and I bound to face an evermore challenging and grim world? My automatic instinct, which I suspect is shared by many other people, is that of course the world is getting worse. I read the newspaper every day, and there is no shortage of things to worry about. I wonder, though, if this instinct to that leads us to believe the world is only getting worse is something akin to macrocosmic anxiety. It is difficult for me to talk myself down from my own anxiety, and it often requires some kind of evidence I can point to as a counterargument to that anxiety. For example, in worrying about whether I’m good enough to endure my second year of teaching, I can look back at my first year and tell myself that if I survived that year, so I can survive this one, too. Does that mean evidence that the world is not such a terrible place can help reduce the macrocosmic anxiety? I’d like to think so.

That brings us back to what I’ve been reading. Factfulness by Hans Rosling, and the related Gapminder Foundation maintained by his family, is aimed at demonstrating how the world has improved on virtually every front and examining why it doesn’t feel that way. In Rosling’s research and presentations, he found that when people were asked questions about the various problems that face the world, the vast majority of people overwhelmingly selected the grimmest option. Those answers are factually incorrect, and even knowledgeable people from various industries performed worse than a random 1 out of 3 chance. He calls this an “overdramatic worldview,” and it is one decidedly at odds with the statistical reality of our world today. Crucially, Rosling cautions us against overblown optimism that might lead to complacency. Instead, he describes the world as “bad and better”: many terrible problems still exist and must be confronted, but work in virtually every field and industry will be less effective if we don’t have an accurate picture of the world as it really is. Still, he reminds us that “step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not by every single measure every single year, but as a rule.” That rule is easy to lose sight of – and, in fact, Rosling spent much of his career demonstrating exactly that – even without an anxiety disorder. However, a grim worldview is all the more compelling and seemingly self-evident through the distorted lens of an anxiety disorder. Anxiety is fundamentally illogical and is rooted in imagined worse case scenarios, but extensive data and persuasive arguments can chip away at that distorting lens.

Meanwhile, Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker takes a narrower, but much deeper, look at how the world has improved. In his extensive book, Pinker examines how violence of every type has statistically decreased over the course of human history and that “today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.” While that sentence alone, if true, is comforting, Pinker cautions that this shift “has not been smooth; it has not brought violence down to zero; and it is not guaranteed to continue.” This is not unlike Rosling’s description of the world as “bad and better.” This statistical decline should not lull us into complacency, particularly when many of the causes Pinker points to (the “civilizing process” of social norms, international cooperation, empathy towards others, etc.) seem to be losing popularity in the public discourses of the United States and beyond. However, this book, like Factfulness, can be evidence against a worldview filtered through the lens of anxiety. If other people are like me and require evidence to diffuse the chain of “what ifs,” then these books may be of particular value. If nothing else, it has been enlightening, comforting, and all the more fascinating to read these as someone who tries to base his beliefs on evidence and as someone who tries to combat his fundamentally irrational anxiety disorder with contrary evidence.

None of what I’ve said above is a recipe for fixing our society’s macrocosmic anxiety or the microcosmic manifestations that are the anxiety disorders affecting myself and some of my students. However, I think a path forward in this arena is simpler than it may seem. Sharing with my students that I have an anxiety disorder was largely an accident the first time, but it has been a purposeful choice ever since I saw how it helped one of my students. Not everyone has an anxiety disorder, thankfully, but we all have struggles and challenges. I don’t mean to suggest we bare every wound and every hurt in the middle of our classrooms, but instead only to tell our students that they are not alone in their pain and their difficulties. I hope to see us bare what we can manage, and what is appropriate to our circumstances, in an effort to foster more empathy and break down barriers of loneliness. Of course, if we stack our individual struggles next to one another, they may not be objectively equal, but that sort of comparison is not a path to empathy. In the words of Ash Beckham, “Hard is not relative. Hard is hard….There is no harder, there is just hard.” It is important that our students know they are not the only ones struggling to deal with something hard. All the better if they can know that they are not the only ones dealing with a specific challenge or disorder.

While they are by no means the only challenge our students face, mental health disorders still live largely in the shadows of social and self-imposed stigmas. One major factor is that they are labeled as “disorders,” admittedly even in this very blog post. They are atypical, often not readily understood by people who haven’t experienced it, and many can be difficult to precisely diagnose and treat. Adolescents may be particularly prone to this stigma, according to research conducted by T. Moses. In Moses’ research, nearly half felt stigmatized by family members, including forms such as “unwarranted assumptions, distrust, avoidance, pity, and gossip.” More relevant to us, as teachers, more than a third reported feeling stigmatized by their teachers, perceiving the teachers expressed “fear, dislike, avoidance, and under-estimation of their abilities.” Even those out there who have no mental disorders can still help reduce the stigma by bringing their own challenges out of the shadows, to whatever degree she or he is comfortable. Contrary evidence to the easily internalized grim view of the world will be most effective in reshaping people’s worldviews, on the large and small scales, only after the “what ifs” of anxiety have been defused.

There is no cure-all or quick fix, but greater honesty about what is hard in our own lives can be a meaningful and relatively simple step forward.

Works Cited

Beckham, Ash. “We’re All Hiding Something. Let’s Find the Courage to Open Up.” TED.com, September 2013. https://www.ted.com/talks/ash_beckham_we_re_all_hiding_something_let_s_find_the_courage_to_open_up. Accessed 26 December 2018.

El-Mallakh, Rif, Richard H. Weisler, Mark H. Townsend, and Lawrence D. Ginsberg. “Bipolar II Disorder: Current and Future Treatment Options.” Annals of Clinical Psychology, 18, 4, 2006, pp. 259-266. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10401230600948480 Accessed 30 December 2018.

Fletcher, Jenna. “What’s to Know About Bipolar II Disorder?” Medicalnewstoday, 7 September 2017. Edited by Timothy J. Legg. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/319280.php. Accessed 26 December 2018.

Gapminder: Unveiling the Beauty of Statistic for a Fact-Based World View. Gapminder Institute, March 2018. https://www.gapminder.org. Accessed 26 December 2018.

Moses, T. “Being Treated Differently: Stigma Experiences with Family, Peers, and School Staff among Adolescents with Mental Health Disorders.” Social Science and Medicine, vol. 70, no. 7, 2010, pp. 985-993, doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2009.12.022. Accessed 27 December 2018.

Prager, Dennis. “The World is Getting Worse, but This Time America Won’t Save It.” Townhall, 8 March 2016. https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2016/03/08/the-world-is-getting-worse-but-this-time-america-wont-save-it-n2130079. Accessed 26 December 2018.

Down to Earth

Astronaut Karen Nyberg in the International Space Station. (Source: NASA)

The Decline of the Space Program

Part 1 of 2

Starting when I was five, my brother and I would sometimes sneak out of bed at 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. to watch TV. Our usual TV fare consisted of cartoons and Star Trek: The Next Generation, but these early morning escapades were for something different. On those occasions, we would turn to the public access channel to watch something we found truly amazing: a Space Shuttle launch. These events could drag on for more than an hour with little activity and almost no sound or voice-over. There must have been something truly magical about such an event if what was effectively a still image could hold the attention of a five- and seven-year-old for so long. I grew up watching Star Trek, Star Wars, and most other science fiction I could get my hands on. The launch of a Space Shuttle was a chance to see real-world space heroes in action.

When I was a child, the space program was still making the headlines. Two years before I was born, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff. The first component of the International Space Station was launched when I was ten. Mir, which I had the good fortune of once seeing through a telescope, was decommissioned and destroyed when I was thirteen. When I was fifteen, the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry. Finally, when I was 23, NASA launched the Space Shuttle for the last time.

The people who risked their lives in these voyages, and the engineers who made it possible, were rightly considered heroes. It was no surprise, then, that kids my age wanted to grow up to be astronauts. Children often dream of growing up to be superheroes, and astronauts still qualified as superheroes when I was young. Now, NASA’s budget is a shadow of what it once was, the United States has to hitch a ride with other countries in order to get people into space, and there are few exciting prospects for human space travel in the near future. Appreciation for space exploration and its impact on our culture have faded as I’ve grown up. The superheroes have fallen back to earth.

I believe one of the most crucial (and elusive) components of education is passion. If students cannot be excited about what they are learning, education becomes a far more difficult and unpleasant uphill battle. As an English teacher, I am more fortunate than some; many students have a passion for stories of one kind or another and I have many avenues for building on that interest. The STEM fields are not always so lucky. Particularly for students who struggle with math, the sciences can be intimidating and students can feel that they have no inroad into the complex work of science. There is no single solution to our students’ difficulties with science, but finding ways to excite a passion for science is an important part of addressing these issues.

In another life, I’d like to think I could have been a physicist. My love of science fiction, fondness of stargazing, and, maybe most significantly, my admiration for astronauts and the space program fueled my interests in science. Something like the United Federation of Planets was not likely to be created in my lifetime, but journeys to Mars and beyond didn’t seem so improbable. If I struggled less in math, maybe I would have pursued being an astrophysicist instead of an English major. NASA’s national presence declined as my struggles with math increased. While my difficulties in math were probably the biggest factor that deterred me from pursuing a career in science, I wonder how much I may have also been deterred by NASA’s disappearance from the headlines. At a time when America’s scientific literacy is suffering, we need all the help we can get in exciting students about the STEM fields.

In 2012, astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson gave a keynote speech at the 28th National Space Symposium discussing the decline of NASA and particularly human space flight. This speech charts areas Tyson believes the space program influenced: ranging from Doctors without Borders to the EPA to fins on cars in the 1950’s. One of the most important roles of the space program in our national consciousness was as a means to excite students about the STEM fields:

"[In the 1960’s], you didn’t need special programs to convince people that science was a good thing in school. You didn’t need special programs to show people that engineering and math - the STEM fields - that these are useful to society, to our identity as a nation, because the headlines that were writ large over that era had built into them the fact that innovation created those headlines: innovation brought to you by an ambitious community of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians."

"Space is hard, space is dangerous, space is exciting. Not only do you innovate, these innovation make headlines, and those headlines work their way down the educational pipeline. Everybody in school knows about it. You don’t have to set up a program to convince people that being an engineer is cool. They’ll know it, just by the cultural presence of those activities. You do that, it’ll jumpstart our dreams, that’s what it’ll do."

Tyson believes that reinvigorating innovation and a passion for the sciences needs to come from more than educational policy or teacher training. Without something like the space program, we lack programs and goals “befitting the depth of ambitions of [these] students,” as he says in an interview published in The Atlantic. We, as teachers, have an important role to play, but we can only be one part of the culture that is needed to support a passion for the sciences.

“Teacher training? We need that. It is a necessary but insufficient condition to make this happen [to build and keep a strong innovation culture in the United States]. You can have an awesome teacher in middle school, high school, now you want to become a scientist, you come out the other end of that educational pipeline. What do you do? We lost an entire generation of these smart people. They became like investment bankers or lawyers out of the 1980’s and 90’s, ‘cause there’s no place for them to take their interest in science. If you have big, bold, ambitious projects, you get them all. Especially since the NASA science portfolio involves biologists: we’re looking for life. It’s got chemists, geologists, astrophysicists, physicists. The NASA portfolio touches all of these. Not only that, we need the electrical engineers, the mechanical engineers, the structural engineers. NASA is a one agency showdown.”

According to recent studies, the performance of students in the United States is particularly weak when it comes to math. The PISA survey argues that “students in the United States have particular weaknesses in performing mathematics tasks with higher cognitive demands, such as taking real-world situations, translating them into mathematical terms, and interpreting mathematical aspects in real-world problems.” Our educational philosophies tend to strive towards purposeful lesson design and real-world application, but it seems math is one area that is falling short of these goals. Tyson’s argument implies that part of the problem may be a lack of excitement for math in the real world, that students have little opportunity to innovate in the science fields like space exploration and are instead drawn toward other math-heavy industries like banking and programming.

Private industry is, of course, crucial to our economy and many people aspire to do great things through private companies. It often seems that the private sector may hold the future of space exploration as SpaceX advances towards being a major supplier for the International Space Station and companies like Planetary Resources hope to begin mining asteroids. NASA seems to be fading into the background as shuttle flights have been discontinued and the International Space Station will be decommissioned around 2020. For my part, I find it hard to take pride in the space successes of private companies; they’re not something I can feel like I’m a part of. Even if I was never involved with NASA, it still felt like we, as Americans, were collectively making these strides. When it is an achievement of a private company, the success feels like something that’s happening to someone else, over there. Even if the achievements of private companies could excite students about the sciences, Tyson rejects the idea that the private sector is prepared to step into the vacuum, or even capable of doing so:

"Will space entrepreneurs lead the frontier in space, rather than NASA? The answer is: no! That cannot happen. It will not happen. Because space is expensive, it is dangerous, the risks are unquantified. You put all three of those together and you can’t say, 'okay, who’s in?' It doesn’t work that way. There’s no business model for a corporation to do something expensive with uncertain risks where you might die. Governments have historically taken on those first steps….In the 1960’s, low Earth orbit was a frontier for the nation. It is not a frontier anymore. So sure, let private enterprise have at it, provided that NASA still gets to go someplace beyond. Otherwise we’re just closing up shop.”

The Common Core, and most of our general education discourse, is often focused on career readiness and college preparation. I frequently hear complaints from my college freshmen about having to take classes that aren’t related to their degree or future career. Based on things like these complaints, and the majority of my students being business majors, college is a means to an economic end for many students. Ten years ago, in his book Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling, James Paul Gee argued that the “new capitalist world” is one that depends on employees marketing themselves to potential employers. He describes that “Millennials like school less with each passing year, but accept it as necessary for their future…precisely because they (and their parents) are aware of the role that educational credentials, especially from elite institutions, play in the new capitalist world.” When we have given students a world where economic gains are the hallmark of success, and when headlines are dominated by economic concerns and scientific discovery is pushed far out of the limelight, this attitude makes sense. In such a world, why shouldn’t they become investment bankers and lawyers? Even if they enter into academia, their time will be increasingly dominated by politics and economic issues as universities grapple with shrinking budgets and the prospect of shifting to a business model. Without something like the space program, we are giving students little reason to have anything but down-to-earth dreams.

As with the success of private enterprise, there is nothing wholly wrong with this attitude, but it does not align with what I believe the purpose of education to be. Nor does it align with most childhood dreams of becoming literal or figurative superheroes. According to a Forbes article published in 2008, “superhero” was the most popular career choice among the kindergarteners they interviewed (being published in Forbes, the dreams jobs had to be discussed in terms of prospective salaries). There will come a time when a student will accept that they cannot be Spiderman, but I believe it is in our best interest as a nation to give them a middle ground between Spiderman and an investment banker, to give them dreams of being the heroes I grew up adoring. Astronauts can’t be just smart, or just fit. It does not mean pigeonholing someone as a limited specialist. A great superhero is one who is smart, strong, and moral. No matter how much a child may dream, they’re not likely to become a superhero out of a comic book, but if our country gives them exciting reasons to get involved in the space program, being an astronaut may not have to be second best.

Enabling these dreams requires a culture that fosters them, and for the sciences I know of no better means than reinvesting in the space program. Tyson’s call to double NASA’s budget from about 0.5% of the federal budget to 1% would be a meaningful step forward, but a culture that supports exploration, innovation, and passion for the sciences cannot be constructed solely through legislation and budgeting. This has to be a social change as well as a budgetary one. A strong space program must arise out of a culture that supports the program's ideals, and in return it will reinforce a culture that values the sciences and the heroics necessary for human space exploration. Next time I will discuss the role I feel teachers outside of the STEM fields have in building this culture. While I agree with Tyson that our space exploration should not be limited to one destination or another, the example of the first crew that might voyage to Mars is a strong illustration of the kind of heroes the space program might build:

"We have built into our culture this concept of the 'right stuff.' I think it's a great bit of iconography of [the space] era. We milked it quite well, I think. Heroes are made out of this. I think that first crew, whatever its numbers...is a special class; they're doing what no one has done before. This is not a lottery. You want people who you want to emulate. You want people who did well in school. You want people who ate healthy. You want people who are moral. You want people who can become that next generation of heroes, because if they make it to Mars, and even if they don't, they're our heroes. They're our heroes in life and in death."

When students have these kinds of heroes to look up to, or even to someday become, teachers will have a substantial advantage in our own difficult mission of exciting students’ passions for the sciences and education as a whole. It is up to us as a society to help these superheroes take flight.

---

Works Consulted

Ewalt, David M. "When I Grow Up: Kids' Dream Jobs." Forbes. 1 Oct. 2008. Web. 6 August 2014.

Gee, James Paul. Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Heller, Chris. "Neil DeGrasse Tyson: How Space Exploration Can Make America Great Again." The Atlantic. The Atlantic Monthly Group, 5 March 2012. Web. 6 August 2014.

"ISS037-E-026900 (4 Nov. 2013)." Photograph. International Space Station Imagery. NASA, 2013. Web. 7 August 2014.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration. "FAQ." nasa.gov. NASA, n. d. Web. 7 August 2014.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. "Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Results from PISA 2012: United States Key Findings."  OECD, oecd.org. 2012. Web. 7 August 2014.

Planetary Resources. "Our Vision and Mission." planetaryresources.com. Planetary Resources, n. d. Web. 8 August 2014.

Tyson, Neil DeGrasse. "Launch Keynote." 28th National Space Symposium. Broadmoor Hotel, Colorado Springs, CO.  23 April 2012. Web. 8 August 2014.