Modeling our Struggles

How can you teach something you have not yet mastered yourself? I am faced with that often as a teacher. The feeling of inadequacy is very high when I am trying to help my students to overcome challenges or master skills that I myself cannot seem to master. I have spent many hours agonizing over how I can possibly hold students to a high standard when I myself fall short so many times. Let me give you an example.

I have difficulty staying organized. My desk often looks like a tornado attacked and had a vendetta against my paperwork. That being said, when I have a student with the same difficulty I wonder what right I have to tell them how to keep their space organized. I often feel that if I cannot be successful in keeping my desk clean and organized, then I should not be allowed to hold them to a high standard of cleanliness and organization. That couldn’t be any further from the truth though. The importance is not my own personal mastery, but instead how I go about teaching the skill to others.

When I am needing to teach a student how to achieve a standard of excellence that I myself fall short of, I must first be honest with the student and myself about my struggle. In the example above, I must first recognize my own struggle with cleanliness. Then, when approaching my student, I need to be honest that I am not perfect at this either. When I help them organize, I must also model the process with my own desk. Our students see our struggles, and they know we are not perfect. If we pretend that we are perfect, we will end up alienating them and being ineffective as teachers. Honesty in our struggles, and modeling of how we overcome them, will better reach our students.

Once again, understand that I am far from perfect at this. I can easily fall into the trap of “do as I say, not as I do”. However, when I am able to correctly model how to overcome struggles, my students not only learn valuable skills but also learn how to overcome a struggle without making excuses. Now, understand that I am not telling you to “overshare” your personal lives with your students. There still needs to be a level of professionalism and the distance that comes from a teacher/student relationship. The skill of honest struggle within this professional level relationship is one that will take time to master.

Let me give you another example. I have a student who struggles with conflict management, especially when frustrated. He will often begin yelling and acting confrontational as soon as a situation does not go the way he would like. One day, he was struggling with his math assignment and began to yell at me. Now, my first instinct was to yell back, which would have increased the level of the confrontation. Instead, this time, I was able to model how to deescalate the situation. I let the student know that I was feeling frustrated and unable to speak kindly and with good purpose at that moment. I told him that I need 5 minutes to cool down, and that we could try to resolve the situation after that. After the five minutes had passed, both the student and I were able to calmly discuss the situation, and he was able to complete his math assignment.

Many times I have failed to deescalate a situation and instead I responded in kind. Those situations never turned out the way I wanted them to, and both the student and I lost. By modeling the fact that I was struggling with how to respond, I was able to teach my student how to deal with frustration in a more positive way. Don’t give up when you fall short. Just be honest with yourself and recognize that even our failures are opportunities to grow and learn.