Keeping It Together

  Your worst fear isn't divorce - it's that moment when everything spills out in class When I was in junior college, our class made a teacher cry. I don't even remember what it was that triggered it, but I guess we were just being awful 17 year olds. All we knew was suddenly, she ran out mid-lesson in tears. We were mortified. What had we done? What we didn't know was that her fiancé had just broken their engagement. As 17 year olds, we were only capable of a very basic level of cognitive empathy. We didn't know how it felt, but we just knew that a broken engagement was a sad thing to go through. So we collectively wrote her a card of consolation. Now, as an adult, a mother and educator who had gone through divorce, I'm understanding the full spectrum of what she must have been going through. Perhaps she was feeling, "Why is everyone bullying me?" I also wonder, did the other teachers whisper about her in the staff room? The news definitely spread to...

Breaking the myth of the perfect educator and discovering self-worth beyond the classroom As educators, we often hold ourselves to impossibly high standards. We believe we must be perfect role models - people who have it all together, who make all the right choices, who exemplify wholesome lives without complications or messy emotions. Divorce, then, feels like celestial punishment when it happens; it becomes a source of deep shame, making us feel unworthy of standing before our students. But let's pause for a moment. Read that expectation again. Doesn't it sound utterly ridiculous? We would never demand such perfection from our colleagues, our friends, or even our students. So why do we impose this unrealistic burden upon ourselves? The Moment Everything Changed Years ago, when my divorce was still fresh, I found myself in an ordinary moment that would teach me an extraordinary lesson. I was waiting with a 7 year-old student for her parents to arrive. As we chatted about holid...