Making Some Space
The day a fellow teacher praised me for my patience I kind of gasped. To acquire any quantity of that precious quality makes you feel Vanderbilt rich.
I worked in a preschool for a few months this year. It was my first foray back into the workplace since having our son. Besides learning that, through some strange principle of economics, the more I work the less money we have, I had a chance to witness a real pro and beautiful person in action, Miss Jenny. Miss Jenny was my son’s preschool teacher. He still asks about her. She has become the teacher archetype in my son’s mind. If one goes to school, one has a teacher named Miss Jenny. It will be so hard to measure up to her I pity his future teachers a little.
One of the many things I admired about Miss Jenny was how unflappable she was. This is a mandatory trait for preschool teachers, no doubt. It’s mandatory for all teachers, but especially for the brave souls who venture forth into the city streets with eight or nine kids below the age of four. The first time I arrived back at the school after walking the kids the five blocks to the playground I likened it to herding cats. It was scary and exhausting.
Miss Jenny could repeat the same super basic instructions a seemingly infinite number of times without flipping her lid. “Crystal, don’t eat the chalk, Honey.” Or “Jason, if you bang your head on the table over and over, you’ll get a booboo. You surely will.” And then she could make them positive like, “Andy, I love how you are NOT eating the play dough. That’s awesome.” I never heard Miss Jenny raise her voice and speak in a rough way, despite the way super young kids will do obviously crazy things like chew on used band aids. That aren’t theirs. That they found in the parking lot. She had a plan for everything that could be modified quickly. She was so patient she made the kids feel loved and safe. When people feel loved and safe, that’s when the learning can begin. She was a pro who loved her job. God bless her.
I was a Special Education aide in a Junior High for a number of years. That was actually the last thing I ever saw myself doing because it seemed to me that there are few groups of people who could be more frustrating to work with than adolescents who are facing additional challenges. As I have said before, I learned more from them than they learned from me. Miraculously, I really learned to love adolescents and realized that it’s much harder to be an adolescent than to spend time with them. They change over night and therefore keep you on your toes. Mercurial is the word.
Thank God I ended up in that old Junior High, because I surely acquired some sorely needed patience while there. It was forged. Picture red glowing steel being hammered and pounded and flipped. Shove it back into the flames and then pound it some more.
I recall the moment I accepted the fact that all instructions would need to be repeated 678 gazillion times. I said, “Self, you need to stop getting angry about this forever. These munchkins will always, until the end of time and back again, need for you to repeat instructions. It doesn’t matter how much you threaten or reward them. They will need for you to repeat them over and over. And if you write them somewhere, even in five different places, you will need to remind them of that 678 gazillion times.”
When I accepted this fact, it only took a few months for me to really and truly stop feeling steamed when I had to repeat simple things. I didn’t want to accept it because I felt that God had made some kind of mistake in the design of the adolescent. Surely at their age they should be able to jot down the instructions and not lose them, no? When I humbled myself enough to toss my flawed idea and try out a new one, I actually, ironically, learned something, which then made me a much better teacher. The day a fellow teacher praised me for my patience I kind of gasped. To acquire any quantity of that precious quality makes you feel Vanderbilt rich. Miss Jenny still has me beat. She’s in a different ballpark all together. But in that one context, I somehow managed to get it.
I realized that we would stand still as a class, that nothing would happen, unless I could get a grip on my emotions and simply refuse to let certain things bother me anymore. People who teach for decades go through emotion after emotion, situation and situation and do this breakdown. This is why they are great people who should be paid way more. This is why the fact that an average American teacher now lasts roughly four years is a tragedy. I also realized that I was attending college classes at night and not listening to basic instructions. The professors had the same dumbfounded expression on their faces. Rabbis surely can relate to this too. As can the wives of those Rabbis, who know that even the rabbis come home and fail to follow simple instructions. Although way, way, way less than the rest of us.
Patience is one of those traits that doesn’t transfer easily. What I mean is, the fact that one can be patient with adolescents who are world class testers of patience, doesn’t mean that one can be patient with one’s neighbor whose friends always block your driveway with their cars- cars that inevitably contain bass woofers that are so low and loud they make your liver flap. I guess on some streets it’s OK to block someone’s car in. It’s the same street where children never nap, because it’s too loud to. See? Now I’m feeling impatient.
So I shall now quote from “Everyday Kindness: The Path of Mussar” by Alan Morinis. This is from the chapter “Patience”.
Being able to call on patience…depends on having cultivated your awareness of the telltale signs of impatience so you can spot them right in the instant that they begin to stir. This practice is to witness and name the feelings just as they come up, which requires that you say to yourself, “I’m feeling impatient” or “There’s impatience.” Just by forming those words, you are holding open at least a tiny crack through which the light of consciousness can still shine, and if you can do that, then at that point what is going to happen is that impatience is suddenly no longer so certain.
This seems like a reasonable approach to me. Lack of patience is such a pervasive, global issue a first step like simply identifying when we are being impatient makes sense. Just stop and make the space for another option. May we all be blessed with the ability to make some space for something besides frustration with one another and to let a little bit more Miss Jenny into our lives.
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