"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.

"I Could Be Magical"

Young Adult Genre Fiction's Role in Empowerment and Identity

Maria

Young adult literature enjoys widespread popularity. They are often the most successful book in economic terms, the crowning achievement of which is, of course, the Harry Potter series. While it is treated as a second-class form of literature (not appropriate for "adults;" it's right there in the name), it is beloved by many. It can serve as a gateway to more complex literature, and it can entice readers who might not otherwise pick up a book. But if a recent article from Slate.com is any indication, there is still considerable prejudice against these books. The idea that someone should be ashamed of indulging in books in their free time apparently lives on after we all leave high school. How could we forget that reading (at least the wrong thing) is uncool, and that we should strive for acceptance from our peers? If this is how we treat adults who read for pleasure, teens must be all the more troubled, as their English classes and the adult world expect them to put away childish things and move onto "adult" reading. This attitude reinforces the adolescent fear: reading can make you an outcast.

Or is it the other way around? Maybe it is no coincidence that YA fiction is labeled "escapism." Maybe being an outcast can make you a reader.

In the case of Maria, reading was a means of escape. Maria is a 26-year-old woman who is from a traditional Mexican family in Fort Collins, Colorado. Today, she is the first person in her family to go to college, and one of the few that reads for fun. She thinks those two traits are likely connected. Maria has loved reading since the second grade: "I was good at [reading]. I was better at it than anyone in my family. So it became my thing. It still is my thing." She believes that this passion for reading has enabled her to be academically successful today. Her favorite stories to read are young adult fantasy novels, and she traces the roots of this passion all the way back to the first Harry Potter book she read in fifth grade. For her, those books were something special. They weren't just a means of entertainment, they showed her a very special kind of escapism: "other ways of living."

If young adult literature can turn a girl into the only reader in her family, set her on the path to be the first college graduate in her family, and show her "other ways of living," then these books should be highly valued and respected. "Escapism" is often a considered a vice, something for people who lack the will or skills to handle reality. For Maria, young adult books were a means of escape. They were not only an escape from her loneliness as a teenager, they may well have given her a means to escape the cycle of poverty. This escapism should be highly prized, as should the literature that enabled it. To learn more about how reading young adult fiction influenced her life, I sat down with Maria to ask her some questions.

Paul: How would you say you first got hooked on reading?

Maria:

My second grade teacher really helped me learn to love to read. That was one of the things she really helped me with. But my fifth grade teacher really helped me learn how to love fantasy, I guess. He really got me into the genre. He read the first Harry Potter book to us in class. I told him that I had the collection of the C.S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia series, but I was missing one of them, I was missing the Magician’s Nephew. He asked me if I liked them, and I told him I did enjoy them. The next day, when I came to class, there was a copy of the Magician’s Nephew on my desk.

He really encouraged my reading in that sense. He asked me questions about what I was reading, he was engaged, and, I mean, he gave me a book. He encouraged me in that way. My family wasn’t very affluent. When I got books it was usually from the library or for Christmas. Before that, I read strictly non-fiction and science a little bit. The science we were learning in elementary school was pretty basic. I remember liking to read about space and the forest. I really liked the forests. And then with my fifth grade teacher, he really helped me with knowing I could like things other than reading about normal or real things.

Paul: You emphasize the importance of fantasy. Do you think that genre was more successful at turning you into a reader than, say, realism would have been?

Maria 1

Maria (audio recording provided above):

Definitely. I feel like Harry Potter has a lot of strong female characters, and that was something I was lacking in my life. I may not have been very openly saying "I’m totally a wizard" or those type of things, but seeing a character like reading as much as I did really helped. Like Matilda, who I really related to because she also liked to read a lot and she was also magical. So I guess thinking that I could be magical in some way helped, too. You know, magic is where you make the impossible possible. I think a lot of people in lower income families and in poverty don’t have that as a view; they don’t get to see that any other way. These things that are impossible can’t be possible. I guess it’s just a different way of looking at life.

For me personally, I like to read for enjoyment, so I read stories with happy endings, which I know is not at all realistic. But like I said, I was surrounded by misery. The last things I wanted to read about was someone having an okay life and having something work out for them, only to have it ripped away from them in the end. Many realistic stories, that I’ve read anyway, have always ended up with misery. For me, I don’t think realistic stories would have been effective at all. It would have just reinforced what I was seeing, and therefore I would have been like: "there’s no point. I can’t fight this. Everyone struggles. There’s no point in fighting what I’m seeing now because even the books tell me that this is it; this is how shitty life can be."

Maria 2

Maria (recording above):

I grew up in a very poor town, too. My family was very poor all the time. So what I saw more often than not was the women dropping out of high school and having children before they were 20 years old. I think everyone in my family has had a child before they were 23. And that goes for male and female. That’s what I expected. I kind of expected I would end up getting married, having three or four kids, and I was even expecting to be married to a man I may not even like. There was a lot of unhappiness that was surrounding me.

In Harry Potter, particularly with Hermione, really showed me that I could be smart and I could go places. That I could do things and I was capable of being something more than just a wife or a mother. Not that those are bad things, but in my family it seemed more of a prison for my family, that these women were being just wives and just mothers. It wasn’t anything redeeming; quality of life for them wasn’t that great and I didn’t want that. And that’s where Harry Potter encouraged me to imagine myself in these different roles, imagine myself in these different times, which encouraged me to look for different options.

Paul: There is criticism of young adult literature out there that it features primarily white, middle class characters. Was that ever an issue for you? Did that make it any harder for you to have that escape or to associate yourself with those characters?

Maria:

No, I don’t think so. I honestly can’t say that it would have made a difference. If it was the same story - the story of the kid who lived under the stairs who lost his parents and had these awesome friends - his race wouldn’t have mattered. I can’t recalls ever being upset that Hermione was white instead of black, or that none of them were ever Hispanic. That really didn’t bother me at all, because it was my story, my journey. I also just didn’t care about race. It was something that I either subconsciously tried to avoid as much as possible, or it’s something I didn’t care about. Whereas some people it could be a factor, like my family really cared about what color of friends I had. I didn’t care.

I would make up scenarios in my head. I often pretended I was a witch or a wizard in Harry Potter, specifically in Harry Potter as myself, not has Harry or Hermione. It was always me in their world somehow. It didn’t even matter. I could still be with my family, but I was still a special person in that world. It was so easy to see myself as someone else or see myself in a role I wouldn’t otherwise be able to be in.

Maybe race didn't matter because I was already ostracized in my own family, in my own culture. I felt like I wasn’t really part of the culture. Maybe that had a factor in how I saw these character? Race didn’t matter, because apparently to me it was just another person. My biggest bullies were my family. They made me feel like more of an outsider than race in these books did.

Paul: Your sisters would have gone through many of the same situations as you did. Why do you think they didn't end up being as much of readers as you are?

Maria:

We had different teachers, and we went to different schools. We went to the same
elementary school, but we went to different junior highs and high schools. I went to CLP (Cache La Poudre Junior High) and both my sisters went to Lincoln Junior High. I went to Rocky and they went to Poudre and Fort Collins High School.

And we had different friends. That probably had the biggest influence. The friends I had in high school and junior high read the same books I did, so we were able to read them and discuss them and just talk about these characters and stories. My sister had their gangster friends, their cholo friends, they were always being threatened or getting into fights. They were doing the expected things of a teenager, and I was doing the atypical thing for a teenager. I may not have been a good student in high school, but other than that I was diligent and I followed the rules more often than not.

I think they were happy with where they were at and who they were, and I wasn’t. I think that’s the biggest influence with why I read so much. I needed to see the different options, I needed that escape, I needed that different reality and to portray that different role, even if it was just through reading. So they were content with where they were at and who they were and what they were expected to do. I think that was the biggest difference.

Paul: If race wasn't really a problem for you and your imaginings, do you still think it is a problem that should be address, or should be changed, in young adult literature?

Maria 3

Maria:

It does really suck that the only books where the characters are non-white are realistic situations, like where a family member is a gang member and being prosecuted, or a family in poverty who is just trying to get out ahead. I think it’s a very self-fulfilling prophecy. They’re not only told they’re hopeless from the rest of the world outside of them, they’re also being told they’re hopeless by the characters they’re reading about. I feel like a lot of students who do read for pleasure do it because they are trying to get away. It’s not just because they feel like reading. It’s because they need somewhere to go to that’s different from where they’re at. So, I do believe there is a need to have these different options, to have more non-white characters in the lead that are in the more magical or more powerful situations, where it’s not so hopeless.

Those are the only options we have: be hopeless or be alienated from our culture. Recently with the Coke commercial, people were singing "American the Beautiful" in different languages and celebrating American culture, and people were getting mad about that, even in my classes now. The girl next to me said "They’re in America, they should learn English." I just said "I think it was a really powerful commercial. It made me feel proud to be American and Mexican." I think we need those kind of things, to make us feel proud of our dual identities. We shouldn’t have to be just one or the other. Like Part-Time Indian: he had to really struggle with his dual identity. And he, in the end, didn't really choose his tribe. He had to kind of choose the white people. That's because he was in a situation where if he chose both to be proud of, neither was going to accept him. He couldn't be both an American and a Native American. I feel like a lot of people are in that position; they can’t just be both American and Puerto Rican, even though it’s a U.S. territory. They have to be just American or just Puerto Rican. It sucks. I think we should encourage more dual and multiple identities. In the end, it’s impossible to have just one identity.

Paul: Wouldn't it be nice if that was coming from someone beside a company that's just trying to sell you a drink?

Maria:

How the message gets out there doesn’t matter; it’s the message that’s important. I didn’t see it as a Coke thing, I saw it as an American thing. This is how we should all feel. This is how we should all be. This is what American should be.

Maria's story certainly hasn't always been been a happy one, but for who she is today the value of reading cannot be overlooked. While race may not have stopped her from escaping into books, she had to step beyond realism to find hope. I don't think we can say that need solely arises from the limited representation of people of color in young adult literature, but when her choices are so limited and when "realistic" stories about people of color surround almost exclusively sports, poverty, and gangs, then a reader is left with few options.

People like the author of the Slate article also criticize YA fiction for the unrealistically happy endings, but if we can't make the case to students that reading can be enjoyable, we will have little hope of keeping them reading. More importantly, people like Maria can find comfort and hope in stories that have happy endings. Literature has an incredible power to take on complex and morally ambiguous issues in an engaging way, but giving pleasure, hope, and "other ways of living" to people stuck in unhappy situations is at least as valuable. What is truly embarrassing is to tell those people that they can only have a happy ending in something that is unrealistic. But if we only allow happy endings to exist in fantasy, we should encourage students to seek out these stories and enjoy them. We should strive to remove limitations from students' imaginations and enable them to really see all the possible ways of living by populating stories with more diverse characters or by supporting the reading of genre fiction. These stories can truly make the impossible seem possible, and let all of these students know what it's like to be at least a little bit magical.