A Teaching Handbook for Wiccans and Pagans (24 page)

Falling into hubris can happen to beginning teachers too, who mistake the powerful feeling that teaching can give you for actual power or who think that because they've got a few students, suddenly they are movers and shakers in the community. Ellen Evert Hopman told me a story about a young teacher who thought she was a bigger fish than she really was:

I was at Pagan Pride Day a couple of years ago, and they said they were going to have a panel of elders to speak to the audience. I was invited to be on the panel of elders. I thought, “Well, that's cool.” So I'm up there with a bunch of other
people
—we're all in our fifties, sixties, seventies, right? And then there is this seventeen-year-old sitting there with us. And I just very innocently turned to her, because I had no idea why she was there, and in a friendly way said, “What are you doing here?” Because I didn't know why she was there—to wait on us? Bring us water? What, actually? And I couldn't figure it out. She replied, “Oh, I'm an elder.” And I said, “Oh, really?” and then she immediately ran to find her mother. She was in tears and all upset because I had challenged her.

And the mother came back and was furious. She said that I had destroyed her daughter's self-confidence. How dare I question her daughter? And I was just flabbergasted, because everybody else on the panel was an elder. To get to the status of elder you have to go through hell, literally—I mean years and years and years of teaching and dealing with human frailties and conflicts and initiating people and marrying people and having people die. And, I mean, to really be an elder, it's a lifetime of work and experience—for no pay, of course, because Pagans won't pay for this kind of thing—you dedicate yourself and with very little reward. We have no pensions, we have no health insurance, no retirement, nothing.

And then to have a little seventeen-year-old say that she's an elder because she had founded a coven and she had kids under her—I guess fifteen-, sixteen-year-olds—so we were supposed to respect her. It's difficult. We were supposed to respect her on equal footing with people who are in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. I found that a little difficult, the fact that she had to go running for her mother. I wanted to say—but I didn't—I wanted to say, “Well, look: if you have to go running for your mother, that shows you're not quite there yet.”

Obviously, hubris turns people off, since nobody likes self-important people who bask in their own awesomeness. But worse yet, hubris is almost always built on a false conception of reality—where you think you're more important than you really are—and living in that false place cuts you off from your center and whatever grounds you, and also from the real world and what's going on around you. Teachers who are cut off are ineffective at best.

People wrapped up in their own hubris are distracted by the needs of their own egos and therefore incapable of living up to their hype. We've all seen it: actors, directors, musicians, authors, and athletes who crank out some really great work and are showered with accolades. Then they buy into the image of their own greatness created by the praise and are unable to produce any new work that's as good, because they lose touch with whatever made their work great in the first place.

Hubris can also lead teachers to pull power plays on their students, boss them around, belittle them, and engage in all sorts of other behaviors that are more about controlling students and/or feeding the teacher's ego than about teaching and helping others.

It's good to have some people around who are willing to be straight with you and tell you if they think you're getting too arrogant. Keeping close to your core and revisiting why you teach and what you want for—not from—your students are good hubris antidotes too.

Guru Syndrome: The Cult of You

Be they Pagan, Wiccan, Christian, or any other path, spiritual communities seem predisposed to creating gurus. I am not referring to gurus in the Hindu sense or in the general sense of “teacher.” I am using the term to mean teachers who are perceived as having great spiritual wisdom and knowledge—more than the average teacher—and who acquire followers, disciples, or devotees. A cult of personality builds up the teacher, and the teacher becomes symbolic of and then synonymous with the spiritual teachings followers hope to gain. Followers feel they are dependent on the guru, rather than on their own initiative and intuition, to achieve their spiritual goals.

Sometimes teachers become gurus out of their own hubris, gathering students around them who follow them like ducklings and feed their egos. Sometimes students “create” a guru out of a teacher by putting the teacher on a pedestal and deciding that the teacher will somehow “save” them or give them all the answers they need. And sometimes teachers buy into the inflated, unrealistic image students have created of them, and knowingly or inadvertently set themselves up as gurus with students' enthusiastic help.

It is very important as Pagan teachers that we not allow our egos to make us gurus or allow students to make gurus of us. We are here to help facilitate students' spiritual growth, and although we might guide them, it's crucial that they own the process themselves, or they will fail. Paganism and Wicca are, among other things, ways to claim one's own power. For students, claiming and owning their own power is their means to walking their path and achieving their spiritual goals. When students make you their guru and become your acolytes, they are essentially handing you their power, thus abdicating their responsibility for their own learning and spiritual growth. This can feel great to unwitting teachers—students are putting their faith and trust solely in your hands, and you feel important and needed. But for their sake and yours, it's crucial that you hand students' power right back to them and resist the urge to take on responsibility that should be theirs.

Teachers should be on the lookout for students who might be developing an unrealistic image of them. Melanie Henry commented:

I don't like people looking at me all starry-eyed and getting “teacher crushes” on me. That drives me a little crazy. I can be flattered, but if your eyes are glazed over like that, you're not seeing me.

Another thing to watch out for, especially if you're working with one group of students over a longer period of time, is whether your students are beginning to exhibit cultish behaviors or overdependence on you as the teacher. Magical groups can get very insular, to the point where members spend an inordinate amount of time together and allow other relationships to suffer or fall away. It's important that your behavior as a teacher doesn't encourage students to do this, not only because they're building their own mini cult, but also because they're building it around you.

To avoid the guru syndrome, you also want to nip other codependent behaviors in the bud. If students begin to rely too much on your opinion or help rather than their own ideas and initiative, find ways to put the responsibility for decision making and action back on them. A friend recently told me a story about a teacher of alternative healing whom she greatly admired but hadn't seen for a long time. When she did see the teacher again and observed her with clients, my friend noticed that several of the teacher's clients had become dependent on the teacher, coming to her weekly for up to a decade to make sure they were energetically “in tune with their higher selves.” The teacher was so good at doing this for her clients that they resisted doing it for themselves, even though they could. And the teacher was unwittingly perpetuating this dependency by not cutting the cord and telling students they needed to do this work for themselves.

Students seem to be especially vulnerable to picking up codependent behaviors or putting unrealistic expectations on teachers who have helped them have life-changing realizations or discoveries. When students have these epiphanies, they are sometimes overcome with what I call the “fervor of the newly converted”—the belief that this discovery they've just made is so awesomely powerful that it will work for everyone, and that they must immediately go out and evangelize about this incredible, life-changing realization which, in addition to solving everyone's most pesky problems, will put an end to famine, halt global warming, save the whales and the polar bears, and make all the peoples of the earth embrace each other in peace and harmony. Students in the midst of the fervor of the newly converted might transfer their enthusiasm for their epiphany to the teacher who helped them have it. Remind students who have these revelations in your class that it was they themselves who climbed Mount Everest and made the discovery. You simply provided them with supplies, and maybe a Sherpa.

Another way to pop the guru bubble is to be very open with students. Don't hold back and keep things a mystery. The more mysterious you are, the less “human” you are, and the more students might think that you have some sort of mystical, magical power or arcane knowledge.

Exhaustion and Burnout

Exhaustion and burnout are often insidious. In most cases, they don't overcome you overnight. Becoming exhausted and/or burned out is a gradual process that sneaks up behind teachers slowly. Often they don't realize how fried they are until they are whacked over the head by some cosmic clue-by-four because they were so tired they weren't paying attention. The clue-by-four can be a smallish-but-embarrassing thing, such as a friend or another teacher telling them they're slipping, or it can be much bigger, such as a health crisis brought on by stress.

It can be very difficult to recover from exhaustion and burnout if you let it go too far. I can tell you this from hard personal experience. For the past three years, I have been working on a huge project at my day job that has consumed an enormous amount of my time, including evenings and weekends. On top of that, I've battled a set of serious health problems. My health is improving and my deadline will be met soon, but I know it will probably take me months to get all my energy back again. During this time, it has been very difficult to find the energy or even desire to teach. My class has met much less frequently, and my students haven't gotten the attention they need. And my teaching has really suffered.

Exhausted and burned-out teachers are not inspiring or effective. It is very difficult to motivate or facilitate students' learning when you are exhausted, and it's also hard to drum up the enthusiasm for your subject that you need to teach it well. Students can tell when you're exhausted or burned out, and they're less likely to be engaged and get what they need to out of your class if it appears that you yourself have lost interest.

There are several things teachers do—often with the best of intentions—that can accelerate their own exhaustion and burnout. The most obvious is simply taking on more than they can handle time-wise or energy-wise.

Taking responsibility for students' learning or actions will also drain your time and energy resources very quickly. It's important that they hold the reins of their own spiritual education and journey. If you try to do it, you are robbing them of owning it themselves, and you're also taking on a burden you can't possibly carry.

Trying to control students' learning—the pace at which they learn and internalize the information, how they learn, or whether they learn it at all—can also lead to exhaustion and burnout. Although you will help students gain knowledge gradually by waiting until they have some understanding of a concept before building on it with new, more challenging material (this is called “scaffolding” in teacher-speak), you can't control how quickly students grasp concepts, or at what level. If you are expecting them to come to conclusions at a certain time—or, worse, in the same way as you did or as your other students do—you will be disappointed. Don't wear yourself out trying to make this happen. Most students will “get it” at their own pace and in their own time.

Martyring yourself—throwing everything you have into teaching, getting over-involved in students' personal lives, and/or sacrificing your own needs for those of your students—is a one-way ticket to exhaustion and burnout, as is expecting students to reciprocate to your martyrdom with gratitude and thanks. Many students will appreciate what you do for them, but don't expect them all to say so, and don't expect to counteract your exhaustion with positive feedback from students that might or might not ever come. The sad truth is that although there are exceptions, our society in general takes teachers for granted. Don't depend on student kudos to revitalize you. And if you're sacrificing enough for your students that you could be called a martyr, you're giving up much more than students could ever reciprocate, even if they were inclined to do so. Some of the symptoms of exhaustion and burnout are:

• Finding yourself caring less and less about teaching,
  your students, and/or your class
  
• Feeling tired at the mere idea of teaching
  
• Slacking on your prep work
  
• Dreading an upcoming class
  
• Losing patience and/or getting irritable with students
  on a regular basis
  
• Procrastination of anything having to do with the class
  (my personal favorite)
  

It's best if you can determine that you're heading for exhaustion and burnout before you start having these symptoms, but most teachers don't realize they're in trouble until some of these begin to manifest. Don't knock yourself if you don't notice you're exhausted or burning out until you're in the thick of it, but do try to be aware and catch it before it gets to the point where you either can't reverse it or it affects your physical or mental health. Many of the symptoms are reversible—although it isn't easy if you've gone a long way down the path. Some practical steps you can take if you think you are beginning to burn out are:

• Taking a break or sabbatical
  
• Reducing the class schedule
  
• Teaching fewer classes at a time
  
• Changing up the overall syllabus or the individual activities and lessons you use to teach to make them more interesting to you
  
• Delegating responsibility for some teaching to capable students
  
• Team teaching—ideally, if there are two of you, you only do half the work, although you do have to take some time to coordinate with the other teacher