23. Chapter 18: Frustration

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Transcript

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Chapter 18, Frustration. In Yoga Sutra 2.15, Patanjali describes human suffering as dukkha, which is anything that causes discomfort and uneasiness. If you think about a time when you were upset and what it felt like in your heart, this is dukkha. There are four causes of dukkha outlined by Patanjali. Number one, change, parinama. You suffer when circumstances suddenly change and they affect your life. For example, when the COVID lockdown occurred in 2020, everyone's life flipped upside down suddenly. Number two, longing, tapa. You suffer when you desire something that you are lacking. It can be longing for anything. For example, an event that you missed while in the COVID lockdown. Number three, habit, sansskara. The third is a habit or sansskara. This aspect of pain occurs when you repeatedly cause yourself suffering with a habit that harms you. Some examples of sansskara would be addiction to alcohol, drugs, or junk food. Number four, imbalance, guna. The fourth cause occurs when you're imbalanced, when you haven't slept well or you're jet lagged, or you have lost your regular practices of eating healthy and exercising. When looking back on my first few months in Kuwait, I see that I was experiencing all these causes of dukkha or suffering at once. Circumstances were constantly changing in my world. I was longing for my previous life. I had habits that were detrimental to my well-being. And I was out of balance. I wasn't eating well, sleeping well, or taking care of myself. When learning about the phases of culture shock, I've read that individuals can remain in the honeymoon phase of culture shock for as long as five months before they enter a stage of frustration. It is surprising to me, therefore, that my feelings of frustration began so quickly. Towards the end of October of my first year in Kuwait is when I really began to experience dukkha or suffering. I was still dating Dave, whom I'd met in September. He couldn't spend a night with me unless we went to a party and stayed until the end of it. I was exhausted. While I love to socialize, I couldn't do it five nights a week with such little sleep. It was one late night after another, followed by early mornings for work. We were arguing all the time. I'd spend the night at his house and fall asleep by 11, while he stayed up smoking with his friends. He'd offer to drive me to work in the morning, and then when the morning came, he'd get mad at me for waking him up so early. When I wanted him to drop me at work by 6 15 a.m. so that I would have time to set up before I greeted the students at 6 45, he would tell me that I was crazy and I didn't need to be there that early. Exasperated, I'd tell him, yeah, because you know so much about teaching. He worked in construction management. Our relationship was clearly toxic for me, yet I was clinging on to it for dear life. I wanted and needed to have a boyfriend, and I didn't care how disrespectful he was to me. He was filling a void within me. I was always searching for something in the outside world to make me complete, whether it was a boyfriend, alcohol, food, or anything else. I was looking for the light, unaware that I needed to be the light and bring the light, not find the light elsewhere. In mid-October, it was Islamic New Year and I'd get four days off. My work visa was still being processed, which meant that my passport was still not in my hands. In September, when we had our Eid holiday and we were stuck in the country, I didn't mind because I was excited to explore. But by the time it came to October for our second holiday, I was desperate to leave. I wanted to visit Claire in Dubai. I missed her. We texted back and forth regularly about our experiences, but it felt like forever since we had seen each other in person, and I was desperate to have a cold, foamy beer and eat some bacon. Everyone with whom I spoke said that it was unheard of for a visa to take more than three months to process, and it had already been two and a half. So I booked a flight from Kuwait to Dubai for the long weekend. Claire and I began planning our weekend together. She was going to take me to brunch, which was apparently a thing in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Expats started drinking at noon on a Friday and didn't stop until midnight. Sign me up for that. Of course, due to Murphy's law, my visa did not come through on time, meaning that my passport was not back in my hands. And again, I was stuck in Kuwait. I let this delay roll off my back. However, it was the first of many difficulties that would eventually lead me to break. There was stressor after stressor with no outlet to process them. I would find myself reaching my breaking point daily. One day when I was riding the bus home to Mabula, my eyes began to well up with tears. My friend Connor, noticing my distress, told me something that as a first-year teacher, I'd never forget. He said, Alex, as a teacher, it is impossible to do everything well. It's impossible. Give up. Just pick two or three things and forget about everything else. Do those two or three things well and forget about the rest. That advice changed me because it was permission to let go. It was permission to accept that I'd never be perfect as a teacher, and that everyone else felt the same way I did. Everyone else felt overwhelmed. His advice made me realize that it was okay to stop trying so hard and just do the best that I could. The best would be good enough. And so, taking his advice, I chose three areas of focus for my classroom. First, I decided that my students would learn to be great writers because I loved to write and teach writing. Second, I wanted my students to enjoy social studies because I equally loved history, geography, and culture. Third, it was my goal that one particular child that I had a soft spot for didn't get expelled or suspended from school that year. That is a story for another book. Being a first-year teacher, especially a first-year elementary school teacher, anywhere in the world is difficult. You learn very quickly that the things taught to you at university about being a teacher are pretty much irrelevant without the skills to manage a class. In teachers college, I took courses where I learned about math strategies, word walls, and science experiments. In reality, those are not the most important things you need to know as a teacher. When working with students who are so young, the content that you teach isn't all that important. In actuality, teachers need to focus on implementing classroom management strategies, fostering positive relationships with students, and creating a safe community with respect, rules, and logical consequences, skills that weren't covered in our education program at university. At times throughout my teaching career, it felt like I was a third parent for some of these kids. Homeroom teachers for students aged six to 12 often spend more time with the children each day than their parents do. I dealt with things like searching for lost sweaters and water bottles, memorizing 26 children's schedules, and making sure the students got on the right bus at home time with all of their things. I was responsible for preventing and following up on bullying. It was my job to make sure they brought their money for pizza day or field trips. If you can't effectively manage a classroom and take care of all these details, it doesn't matter how competent a subject teacher you are because all of the content gets lost in the chaos. As a first-year teacher, you aren't given any strategies and you are left to figure out everything on your own. It's like swimming in a shark tank. What added an additional layer of frustration for me was that I just didn't understand the children in my class. We came from wildly different childhoods, cultures, and experiences. What was entertaining in the first few weeks in the country became exasperating and frustrating by November. Yoga Sutra 4.15 says that the same thing perceived by different minds will have different appearances. Vastusani vita bedat teur vikabata panta. This concept is something that I learned during my time in Kuwait. My childhood experiences meant that I viewed the world one way. The childhood experiences of my Kuwaiti students and their parents meant that they viewed the world in a completely different way. I wanted my students and their families to change, but in reality, I was a guest in their country. It was my job to change and understand that the way they were seeing things was different than me. Some of the parents of the local children were removed from the classroom and school life. Drivers and nannies would pick up and drop off the kids each day. Where I was raised in Toronto, the moms of the neighborhood were helicopter parents, always present in the classroom and always eager to volunteer and be fully engaged in their children's education. As a child, I felt like the odd went out because my mom worked full-time, and as a result of that, couldn't be as involved as my friends' moms. I didn't understand that in lots of Middle Eastern countries, the parents are less involved in school life, and that's seen as a good thing. They tend to implement a policy of non-interference when it comes to their parenting. The parents are fostering independence and teaching their children to solve problems on their own. It's simply a different culture and way of dealing with things. I constantly interpreted the Kuwaiti parents' lack of engagement and involvement in their children's education as undervaluing education. I see now that we came from different experiences and held different values and beliefs, and we were interpreting the same thing differently. School started at 6 45 a.m., over two hours earlier than it did for me in Canada when I was their age. The children were late for school every day, something I interpreted as disrespectful. In Canada, the schools were zoned, and I grew up in a city where everyone attended a school that was within five to ten minutes walking distance. Everyone in my neighborhood walked or rode their bikes to school, and there was never any traffic, so it was expected that everyone would show up to school on time every day. I didn't understand the multiple factors that impacted the Kuwaiti's lack of punctuality. The traffic, for example, was terrible. Children traveled from all over the country to come to different private schools in the downtown area. Kuwaiti traditions also impacted the children's punctualities. Some Arab families, for instance, socialize late into the night, often having dinner at 10 p.m. Also, the children were often playing in playgrounds until late in the evening. And this had to do with the climate more than anything else. When it was over 40 degrees Celsius during the daytime, of course the parents wouldn't want their kids playing outside at 2 in the afternoon as they'd get dehydrated. Social life just tended to occur later than in North America. And starting school that early in the morning simply wasn't appropriate for the local culture. In Canada, when a child fell asleep at school, it was seen as rude. In Kuwait, some kids were falling asleep on the table regularly, but it was because they simply weren't getting enough sleep each night. While I expected the parents to put their kids to bed earlier, I see now that there was a culture clash between the East and the West. The Arab families shouldn't have been expected to modify their own culture and traditions to suit the North American school schedule that we were imposing on them. Some of the children in my class spoke fluent English, but a large percentage of my students were from Kuwaiti, Lebanese, Palestinian, Egyptian, and other Arab families where they grew up speaking Arabic. Their parents had sent them to an international school with the idea that they would learn English. However, the curriculum wasn't designed with them in mind. We taught an English language curriculum program from the United States, but it came with no supplementary resources on how to teach non-native speakers the English language. I had no training in this area. A lot of the children were misbehaving, and a lot of teachers interpreted this as a sign of disrespect. In reality, our school was failing them. We didn't have the resources or the tools to support their needs, and we didn't have the cultural understanding either. It wasn't that they were trying to misbehave. For example, as previously mentioned, the kids were exhausted, but we as an academic institution could have considered changing our school hours to match the local culture, or consulting with local people and asking them what they thought would be a good solution to this problem. We could have considered starting school at least two or three hours later to accommodate for their traditions and customs. We were two cultures that were not seeing eye to eye. And if we as international educators are going to go into other countries and operate schools there, we need to work together collaboratively. It's not the teachers, it's not the kids, and it's not the families. The whole system was failing all of the parties involved, and a better approach could have been designed. La tekalam Arabia, stop talking in Arabic. I was trying to follow the school rules, but in retrospect, I hate that I did that. I feel like I was trying to unfairly stomp out their mother tongue. If they weren't speaking Arabic while they were in the process of learning English, how were they meant to socialize with their friends or understand my instructions? Over the years, I shifted my opinion on this language policy while working in an international school. Towards the end of my teaching career, hearing my students speak in their home language was something that I encouraged and celebrated, not shut down. When students asked me if it was okay if they spoke to their parents in their home language during student-led conferences or other special events, I always said yes. I let them read books to the class in their home language and teach their classmates words from their mother tongue. The diversity of working at an international school should be celebrated, not eliminated. I hit a point where I was exhausted. I wanted to accomplish everything perfectly and be like Superwoman, and it just wasn't possible. Lesson planning, grading, preparing, designing my classroom, having meetings after school with the parents of the children misbehaving. I was at the end of my rope. I was failing miserably, and despite lying and insisting that I wasn't a brand new teacher, the children sensed my weakness and inexperience and took advantage of it. This is something that most children would do, regardless of nationality. They were constantly crossing boundaries, acting out, and pushing the limits. I'd had enough and I wanted to go home to Canada. I couldn't imagine doing this for a whole year, let alone two.