First Day of School

Today was the first first day of school in many years that I have not been in school. Yesterday was traumatic. The rush of supply shopping and getting the best deals, the craft involved in creating just the right units, and the nervous energy that keeps a teacher (and I suppose students, too) up all night in anticipation--not there. To alleviate my sadness, my husband and I went out for dinner, and I even had dessert. Feed my pain...

Today, I anticipated, would be even worse since this was that first day of school and I wasn't going. I over-planned my morning with chores and errands so that I wouldn't be overwhelmed by the day. Surprisingly, I wasn't--at all. Granted I was pretty busy, but after a good luck text to a still-in-the-trenches friend, I was fine. In fact, I had a very productive day and am now ahead of schedule on one of my projects. So, what happened?

I came across a quote as I was reading from positive psychology guru  Martin Seligman that says, "Relieving the states that make life miserable… has made building the states that make life worth living less of a priority." It turns out, it's all about how you focus your energy. The state that was making me miserable yesterday was missing my former students, feeling left out of the back-to-school hype, and regretting the missed opportunity to meet a new batch of kids. To relieve that, I sulked (not an effective relief of misery) and bribed myself with sugar in order to feel less miserable.

But feeling less miserable shouldn't be the goal. Relieving misery and distracting from the negative has become the overwhelming mantra of popular culture--I blame advertising. You are too this, not enough this, you need this, you are dissatisfied because of this. Instead of letting the media focus our experiences to relieve the negativity, we need to embrace the positive and make increasing happiness the priority.

FYI--happiness is not the absence or relief of misery. Happiness is not the negative space where misery used to be. Seligman challenges us to build positive energy into more than a feeling, but a state of being. We must purposefully create a mental environment that is more at home feeling happiness than misery. We need to make happy the default setting and misery the malfunction. Building the positives helps us control for the negatives and mitigate the misery of a bad day. Things may make you miserable but it's a positive state of being that promotes happiness.

So what does this mean for teachers? I'm going to go straight to testing on this one, and since I taught English, I'll start with reading tests. The occasion for students that would make life miserable is failing and having to re-take a standardized reading test. The failure, the re-take, the frustration--those lead to misery. How do we (as teachers) try to mitigate that misery? Test preparation. Students won't be miserable is we teach them the best ways to take the test so they can pass, feel successful, and not have to take it over again. We remediate, we pre-test, we assess ad nauseum. We try to avoid the negatives of a failed test...instead of trying to build a positive reading culture that our students take with them.

The whole purpose of testing is to ensure that society is composed of literate, critically-thinking individuals. But the best way to do that isn't to test (and test and test...) but to build a culture that creates an environment that embraces the positive benefits of reading. Reading takes you places you've never been, to world that don't physically exist. Reading lets you try on different roles and presents you with new role models. Reading lets you know about the world so you can find your place in it. Reading is power and freedom and belonging and survival and fun--all of Glasser's needs in one activity.

The basic question, then, is this: why do we work so hard to relieve future misery when we should be helping our students build a positive, meaningful relationship to the power of reading.