A Teaching Handbook for Wiccans and Pagans (3 page)

Some Possible Challenges

As you can see, teaching can be a profound, life-changing experience. However, like most things that are really worth our time and energy, it can present some challenges too. You might not encounter any of the following challenges, but it can be very helpful to be aware of them as you begin to teach and think about ways you might avoid or handle them if they pop up.

Teaching Is a Big Responsibility

To be a Pagan teacher is to stand up as a representative of your path and community. You are representing Paganism to the next generation and to the outside world. Your choices will have an effect both on the community and interpersonal levels. What you say and do as a teacher is likely to have a bigger effect on the community or on an individual than if you said it or did it as a non-teacher.

Helping people make spiritual decisions is not something to be taken lightly. Your choices and those of your students can have long-term effects. If you are teaching a specific tradition, you have the responsibility to transmit that tradition accurately. If it is an initiatory tradition and students aren't privy to the whole tradition until after initiation, you also have the responsibility of deciding if your path is right for them and if they are right for your path. Even if you are teaching strangers online, you have an obligation to take it seriously and do it responsibly.

Teaching Can Be Time-Consuming and Expensive

Preparing for classes, finding students and a space to teach in, and teaching the classes themselves requires time and effort, often for little or no money. If you are teaching a class with several sessions or running a standing group, you might also need to work with students individually between classes. For example, I run a coven, and we teach regular classes, but our coven also has a list of requirements—things like reading books, writing papers, performing energy work, and doing community service—and my husband and I need to work individually with each of our students as they go through the list by reading their papers, discussing books with them, and more.

If you teach out of your home, you will spend a fair amount of time getting your space ready for students to be in it and cleaning up afterward. (If you're lucky, they'll help.) We run full moon and sabbat circles in our home as well as classes, so we have people in our living room several times a month. Preparation time for that adds up.

If you are teaching in a more intimate setting or in one where you get to know your students reasonably well, you will also spend a lot of time dealing with students' personal and interpersonal problems. This can take up more time than anything else if the people in your class are going through tough times.

And unless you have a large family, you'll never know how many supplies a group can use in the course of a class until you hold one in your home. I have said that if you teach Paganism, you should automatically be given a magical Costco card so you can stock up on pens, printer cartridges, cleaning supplies, food, and myriad paper products—plates, toilet paper, printer paper—you'll need. And a little wine, too, for ritual or therapeutic use, or both.

Teaching Can Be Hard on the Ego

It's important to remember that teaching has at least as much effect on the teacher as it does on the students. Teaching demonstrates and reinforces what you know, but it can also show you in glaring neon light what you don't. Students can act as mirrors, and they will reflect every great and every dumb thing you say back at you, either inadvertently or on purpose. Are you ready/confident enough to look in the mirror and roll with whatever you see? I can almost guarantee that if you teach for any length of time, you'll have students pointing out blind spots you didn't know you had. Teaching can be very vulnerable experience—a giant serving of humble pie.

Teaching Can Make You a Target

Teaching puts you in the public spotlight and makes you more visible in the community, which can attract negative as well as positive attention. As wonderful as the Pagan community can be, Pagans can also be very catty, and as a teacher—as someone who claims to know something worth teaching—the sad truth is that you might be more exposed to that kind of treatment. In some areas the Pagan teachers band together and help each other, and in others they view each other as competition. We'd all like to think that people who purport to be spiritual teachers would have well-developed ethics, but the truth is that teachers are people—with all of the good and bad qualities of anyone else—and some of them are very threatened by other teachers.

When I first moved to my current city, some of the Pagans I met urged me to stay away from a particular teacher. They gave me all sorts of reasons, from generic things like “She's not ethical” to the more extreme “She forces her students into prostitution!” The idea that someone might possibly be misusing her power that way—taking advantage of people who were vulnerable and coming to her for help—was horrifying to me, so at first I gave this teacher a wide berth. But as fate or chance or the gods would have it, I eventually had an opportunity to meet and get to know this teacher personally through some volunteer work (volunteer work, I might point out, that her accusers were not doing). Once I'd known her for a while, I told her about what I'd heard. When I got to the prostitution part, I expected her to be angry, but instead she laughed so hard she could barely breathe. “How on earth do they think I could get my students to do that, even if I wanted to?” she said, once she'd caught her breath. “I can't even get them to show up to ritual on time!”

The accusations against this particular teacher were over the top, but I tell this story to make a point: You will garner attention from the community when you put yourself forth as a teacher. And in some cases you will be held accountable for the actions of your students too. Even if your reputation in the community is generally positive, a mistake by someone you taught can reflect badly on you, even if the incident was an accident and you had nothing to do with it. A few years ago one of my students unintentionally offended a local elder at a public Pagan event without realizing it. I wasn't at the event, but believe me, I heard about it—in no uncertain terms and from multiple sources. The “put a leash on your student” message came through loud and clear. The student's mistake was definitely seen as my responsibility.

Teaching Can Be Emotionally and Energetically Draining

Don't underestimate the emotional impact that getting involved with people's lives can have on the teacher. If you are teaching a one-off class or online and not interacting too much with students individually, this might not be such a large factor. But if you end up teaching in an intimate setting, you will get to know your students and all of their issues very, very well.

Melanie Henry told me:

No matter how mellow they might seem, or how young and full of beans, or whatever, every student brings you new problems that you have to learn to solve, and if you're going to teach something like the Craft, some of those problems will be very big.

An example from my own experience is the emotional impact teaching high school initially had on me. I taught tenth-grade English in a tough school in a low-income neighborhood in a large city. The school had metal detectors, a police officer, and a clinic and daycare for students' children on-site. My students were from a wide variety of backgrounds, many of them lived below the poverty line, and fourteen languages were spoken in my first-hour class alone. Since I taught English and writing essays was part of the curriculum, my students would often write about their own life experiences, and some of the things they would disclose were so awful—rape; sexual, physical, and emotional abuse; gang violence; drug abuse; time spent in refugee camps literally being tortured—that I'd feel angry, devastated, sad, and helpless. Most of all, I wanted to fix everything, which I obviously couldn't even begin to do. If I hadn't eventually learned to shield a lot of my students' energy and not take their pain home with me, I would have been a complete wreck.

The energetic impact on the teacher is a consideration too. Some students are very needy and naturally latch on to a teacher, and, in worst-case scenarios, they might inadvertently drain your energy unless you learn how to shield. Even if that doesn't happen, it takes a fair amount of energy to be a teacher—to stand in front of a class or devise a curriculum or mentor someone. It's important to ask yourself if you have the energy and shielding skills necessary to teach.

Questions Before You Begin

Whether you feel great, excited, terrified, enthusiastic, nervous, angry, or nauseated at the idea of teaching—and believe me, you might feel all of those emotions—it's a good idea to ask yourself the following questions before you begin.

Why Do You Want to Teach, and
What Do You Want to Get Out of It?

Knowing why you're teaching is vitally important. More specifically, having your expectations somewhat in line with what you might actually get out of teaching is vitally important, so you're realistic and not disappointed. If you are interested in serving your gods and the community, helping others grow spiritually, and/or passing on your path, you are more likely to be happy teaching than if you are interested in making money, becoming the Pagan High Muckety-Muck of your community, having disciples, or becoming a nationally known BNP (Big-Name Pagan). One thing is for certain: the more ego-centered your reasons for teaching are, the less likely you are to be happy teaching.

Are You Hesitating? Why?

If you are hesitating about beginning to teach because of the time, energy, or financial commitment, then you probably have a pretty good sense of what you can and can't offer the community at this time. This is good. If you are reluctant to teach because teaching doesn't speak to you, it's good to acknowledge that too.

Do You Know Your Stuff?

Good Pagan teachers don't have to be omnipotent geniuses, but they should have a firm grounding in their material.

Patrick McCollum told me:

If you're going to be a Pagan teacher, you have to know your stuff. So you can't just go get a book on Wicca and decide that you're a teacher. You really need to be around for a while and experience and be interacting with other teachers and other groups and other forms of Paganism and such to have a bigger picture of what's going on before you can really take on the role of teaching in a bigger way. Obviously, if you're in your own little circle and you've got five or ten people in it and no one knows anything and you've read four books, then you're the best there is for that group. There isn't anyone in the group who knows more than you, and so you share what you know. So continue to try to learn, but you do need to make sure you know what you're talking about.

If you feel you need to learn more before you're comfortable teaching, your gut instinct is probably correct. Although they should be firmly grounded in their subject matter before they teach, many Pagan teachers are called to take on students before they have finished their own training.

T. Thorn Coyle told me about beginning to teach perhaps a little too early:

I began teaching in my late twenties via the Reclaiming Tradition, which at the time had the theory “take a class, student-teach a class, co-teach a class.” On one hand, this was refreshing and liberating; on the other hand, I likely began teaching a bit too soon.

Brian Rowe is currently teaching Wiccan students while he is still a Wiccan student himself. About that experience, he says:

For me, the place where I am as a student also incorporates a lot of learning how to teach and getting feedback on things that I create as teaching tools, so it's actually been pretty valuable for me to teach as a student. I would definitely even encourage students who are in a similar place to teach at that time. It's difficult. It's challenging. It's a lot of work, because you're doing that teaching and you're learning, so you're doing double. But what you can gain from seeing that second side, that reflection, is worth it.

As you're considering whether you know enough and whether you are ready, bear in mind that your perception of your own abilities might be skewed. After all, most of us have a hard time looking at ourselves completely objectively. I have a close friend who wants to teach but has been waffling about it because she “doesn't know enough yet.” The truth is that she knows more than just about any other Pagan I've ever met—far more than I do, and I've been teaching for years. So if you think you don't know enough yet, you might want to ask others for their opinion. Maybe you do know enough, but you don't realize it. I have found that teaching is like skydiving or anything else that you know is worthwhile but you're worried about doing: if you wait until you're completely ready and confident, you'll never do it. Brian Rowe essentially agreed: “Don't wait until you are prepared and understand everything, because you will never get to that point.”

What Are Your Priorities and Goals as a Potential Teacher?

Are you interested in teaching a particular path or tradition? A particular subject? A particular age group or demographic? Do you want to teach to please someone else? Do you want to find and practice with like-minded people? Do you want to teach as a steppingstone to becoming a high priest, priestess, or coven leader? Are you willing to bend or change your goals if the situation doesn't unfold the way you want it to? Taking the time to write out your goals can help you make the decision about whether you're ready and give you a place to start if you are.

What Are Your Strengths as a Potential Teacher?

Are you very knowledgeable about a subject or subjects? Do you have previous teaching experience? Are you a good public speaker? Do you have good people skills? Are you patient and flexible? Are you good in a crisis? Do you have a well-developed sense of humor? Are you confident and grounded? Do you have a mentor or mentors? You don't have to have every single one of these traits to be a teacher, but you should have many of them. You will need every possible resource at your disposal.