Are you HAPpy?

On the afore-mentioned trip to Avol's, I also picked up a self-help book that, unlike the ones discussed in Kaminer's book (see below), appears to be a genuine program of self-help--in this case, for getting control of anxiety.

Anyway, I was interested/amused in this list of characteristics that are often related to anxiety, or in the book's jargon, "High Anxiety Personality" (HAP) traits:

• high level of creativity or imagination (immediately imagine the worst)
  
• rigid thinking
  
• excessive need for approval
  
• extremely high expectations of self (expect self to accomplish things not expected of others)
  
• perfectionism (combination of high expectations, tendency to evaluate self with all-or-nothing thinking; tendency to focus on small flaws or errors instead of overall progress)
  
• excessive need to be in control
  
• suppression of some or all negative feelings
  
• tendency to ignore the body's physical needs
  

Aside from the fact that this describes many of us very well, I can't help noticing that these are traits that the school system (including the university system) encourages and nurtures--especially rigidity, need for approval, & perfectionism.

I'll probably post more about this on MadTeach, but lately I've been thinking a lot about the psychological side of school. I started out with the institutional aspects and the history that spawned them. Over time I struggled to figure out how to be a positive cog in a negative machine, to oversimplify dramatically. Again in shorthand, my conclusion was that I have to help students learn how to defend themselves and not let the machine get to them (see my MadTeach post on survival skills).

So since then I've been trying to figure out how people become internally motivated, what contexts allow and foster curiosity and hard work and learning. I definitely have a lot more to say about this & I'll put it on MadTeach soon. The short version is that reducing anxiety is a HUGE part of this, and that massive anxiety is one of the biggest problems students face in class all the time.

So this book is going to help me with my anxiety, and at the same time, help me learn to help students.

One of the incredibly cool things about learning to teach is that in order to be a good teacher, I have to heal myself, and the things I most need to do to heal myself, will be the things that make me a good teacher. I love this. It feels so right, to go back and forth between "how can I reduce my anxiety" and "how can I reduce the anxiety in the classroom," and to see so clearly that it would be absolutely impossible to do the latter without the former. There's some quote from Emerson or Mark Twain or someone, to the effect that you can't truly help others without helping yourself, and I think that's so true. I'm not sure if I'm making sense but anyway, I am happy.

(HAPpy too, at times, but ever less so).