Proud to Be a Teacher

World Teachers’ Day was this week (5th of October) and I had been approached by a pre-service student at the University of Queensland for an who wanted to interview me for an assignment she had about being a teacher. At the end of the interview, she said to me, “I think they should use you as a motivator to make people choose teaching as a profession. You make it sound like it’s the best profession in the world”. I told her I had heard that many times before, because I am a teacher by choice and not a teacher by necessity.

Teaching, as you probably know, is not the best-paid job in the world. In some places, it is even in the lowest income range, which I find shocking. At the beginning of my career, I thought I valued education only because I needed to justify my choice of becoming a teacher, but every year that passes, I see that this justification is the only one there is, as there are so many disadvantages to being a teacher.

Maybe it was no coincidence I received this story by email on the day I had the interview.

A school principal addressed his students during a graduation ceremony.

He said, “Doctors want their children to become doctors, engineers want their children to become engineers, businessmen want their children to become CEOs, but a teachers also want their children to become one of them. Nobody wants to become a teacher by choice. Very sad, but that’s the truth”.

Then, he told them this story.

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Wisdom from the School of Life

In the “old days”, the elders had a special role in people’s life. Because knowledge back then was not the highest currency, what the elders could give their community was wisdom. Unlike knowledge, wisdom is applied knowledge, achieved after personal experience, experiments, trials and errors and often summed up as rules of living.

Much of our life today is dedicated to acquiring knowledge. School, where you spend about 13 years of your life, is a place that gives you knowledge. If you study a profession, you spend another 3 to 10 years of your life in a school of knowledge.

As an educator, I find most of this to be a total waste of energy. When I did my degree in Special Education, I took an amazing course named “Who needs school anyway?” You would think that the main idea is to teach us that school is the best thing and that everyone needs school, but our amazing lecturer allowed us to explore this topic from many angles. We all had to go and research what school is all about and in my research, I discovered that School was an institute that provided knowledge, but failed to give kids wisdom. School had forgotten its purpose.

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When Good Parenting is a Luxury

This week, I ran another Happy Parents Raise Happy Kids program at a local primary school. I had been in contact with that school for over three years now and had run various programs for students and teachers. For three years, ever since our first program, the principal, Cherie, had been trying to organize this workshop and looking for funds to make it happen. While most schools have a parent body that pushes for the workshop, Cherie had had to do it on her own.

As you can imagine, I started the day feeling frustrated with the time it took to arrange the workshop, but here is the story of what happened to the parents and me that got me to a completely different feeling in the end – gratitude.

8:30 am

I set up everything in the beautiful Resource Center next to the Junior Playground. Cherie said she was not sure how many parents would come. In some of the events she had organized for parents, only one or two of them had come. For this workshop, she had personally contacted each of the parents who had been struggling with their children.

“Ronit, we have many struggling parents”, she said to me several times. The school’s academic achievements had been low for many years and the last professional development with the teachers had shifted something in the dynamic of the school and in the academic achievements, so Cherie thought the parents were the next piece of the puzzle.

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Ronit’s Parenting Bible: School

Kids’ schooling is one of the biggest parts of every parent’s bible. Out of their life at home, about 70% is associated with school in some way – homework assignments, report cards, extracurricular activities, meetings with teachers and more.

My schooling was a nightmare for my parents. I was not a good student (to put it mildly) and my parents really suffered for it. I was not very good in my academic studies, I had social problems, I had behavior problems and the whole school experience was very painful for me.

However, after being kicked out of school after 10th grade for failing too many subjects, I became a good student and won a scholarship for excellence. I then realized that my parents could not have made life easier for me, because they had no rules about school to guide them. They wanted me (and my siblings) to go to school because this is what everyone did and because in their mind, not having education pre-destined you to a life of sweeping streets and collecting garbage.

My personal experience contributed much to my parenting bible. As I went through college, the rules and commandments about school and studies became much clearer.
I am particularly proud of my school commandments and of having kids whose schooling is one continuous ecstasy. Yes, their schooling was not a regular one, because they lived in different places around the world, learned in special programs (some of which I ran myself), skipped grades and did other extraordinary things. But this is what schooling is for me and I am happy and proud that my schooling commandments brought my kids to think of their schooling as the best thing that has ever happened to them.

I have over 1,000 rules related to school and studying. I will share 10 commandments with you today and I hope they will give you inspiration.

Read Ronit’s Parenting Bible: School »

Approval Trap (4): How to get yourself out

If you have followed the activity in the previous post, you probably understand that it is impossible to be totally free from needing approval. Again, do not blame yourself or others for this mindset, because you always do the best you can and your parents always did the best they could. But now that you know how dangerous approval can be to live with, you cannot afford to pass it on to your children, because doing what was done to you is not longer the best you can do.

To change, we need to make a conscious decision to change!

If you need some help in motivating yourself to change, think of how much pain you have endured over the years while seeking others’ approval and about how much more heartache and pain you will have to endure through in a year, 5 years and 10 years if you do nothing.

Think how cruel you will be to your kids by continuing this cycle. My mentor life coach did this trick to me when I faced a difficult change. He said to me, “Would you want Eden to be like this?” and I understood that I managed to live with the pain as a survival mechanism, but I could not live with the pain of being a role model to my daughter and making her suffer for it. I made the change immediately!

The good news is that you can minimize several approval-seeking behaviors at once by developing a single skill. For example, if many of your approval-seeking behaviors are due to lack of significance, working on your sense of uniqueness and learning to feel special will reduce or even eliminate about a third of the behaviors mentioned.

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Optimus Prime: How to help your kids succeed

Compare two kids, one who goes to a beautiful, clean, well-built school that requires excellence and maintains a high level of academic achievement and another who goes to an old, run-down, dirty, crumbling school where students can come and go as they please and learning is not high on the priority list.

Which child has a better chance in life?

Ronit and I are reading a brilliant book called “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” by Malcolm Gladwell. In this book, there are many bits of amazing research, which we can all use to avoid trouble and get more goodness out of life.

In one experiment, two groups of black students were given college entry tests. The tests were identical, except for one question. One group was first asked to specify their race.

That group scored 50% lower on average. Fifty percent! When asked why they scored so low, the students said they were apparently not smart enough to be accepted and had no clue what had gone wrong.

In another experiment, two groups of students took a trivia test. Before the test, one group was asked to imagine what it would be like to be a college professor for 5 minutes. The other group was asked to imagine what it would be like to be a soccer hooligan.

The “professor” group scored 23% higher on the test, simply because they had put themselves in a different mindset.

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Approval Trap (3): Approval-Seeking Behavior

The first step of getting out of any emotional trap is recognizing that you are caged by a mindset that blocks you from being happy and fulfilled – that you are the one giving others power over your life.

People in the approval trap have some common character traits, all related to fear (is there anything besides love and fear?). They lack significance, have low self-esteem and use attention-seeking behavior to gain more significance, although that cannot remove the fear or raise their self-esteem.

Trapped individuals have the idea that to be highly thought of by some important others, they need to stick out, gain superiority by making others feel inferior, pretend to be someone they are not or, in other cases, never take risks to avoid conflict and judgment.

Everyone is trapped somehow, but it is the magnitude of the problem that matters. Use the list of approval-seeking behaviors below to discover if you are trapped or not and how deep are you in the trap of approval.

Give each item a rating from 0 to 10 (0 means you never do it and 10 means you do it all the time). My suggestion is to focus on those you gave high scores, indicating you have that behavior and the next post will give great tips to change that and get yourself out of the trap.

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Approval Trap (2): Are you trapped?

We define our identity through our communication with the people around us. We experience things and get feedback that directs us towards a desired, productive and agreeable behavior. Even the words we use require some form of agreement. For example, if I started writing here in another language, you would leave the website and even get a bit angry at me, because we do not have an agreement that I can write to you in a different language.

It is not easy to recognize when external approval becomes a kind of social trap. In fact, many people reject the idea by saying that we cannot really live without approval. If you feel you cannot live without approval, it must be right for you!

The fact we consider encouragement as approval is not a real problem. There is no person on Earth that does not enjoy it and feel good about it. The problem appears when we are sucked into an approval power game, because it is addictive and turns approval into a need for us.

Wanting to be loved, accepted, part of a group, approved or a source of pride for someone are all natural feelings that help us succeed in life, but when we cannot succeed (or function) without them, we are trapped. It happens slowly, like putting a frog in hot water and heating the water slowly, so the frog cannot feel it is being cooked slowly up to its death.

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Approval Trap (1): Birth to Adulthood

It was a lovely day on my life coaching deck and Talia came over wearing her gorgeous bright-colored dress, but it did not help lighten up her spirit. She was very sad. I had known her for a while and admired her deeply. Talia was an example of perfection for me. She was beautiful, she was friendly, she was knowledgeable, she was in a relationship, she had a perfect job and she was amazingly smart. She played musical instruments (yes, more than one), already held several degrees. While other people struggled to manage their time, she had worked full time and completed 6 university courses with high scores. She had traveled the world. And she had done all that by the age of 25.

Still, Talia was a very sad and tormented woman, because nothing she did seemed to please her mother.

Talia was in what I call the approval trap.

Unfortunately, we are all born into that trap without a choice. The way things are structured when we are young, we seek our parents’ approval to learn about life and build our confidence. Living every day of our life around them makes them almighty gods for us and we do everything within our tiny power to get their approval.

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Raising Hope … in Uniform?

This post is about school uniforms, but it is also about how parents make decisions in life, especially those related to their children.

I recently found out that the parent body (called Parents & Citizens in QLD or P&C, Parents & Friends or P&F in other places and Parent-Teacher Association or PTA in the US) at my daughter’s school has the authority to choose the school uniform. There was a group of parents sitting around our dining room table, having brought Noff’s classmates for a Whacky Hair party, and a few of them were involved in the P&C. When I mentioned my views on the school’s over-emphasis of dressing “properly”, give the fairly restrictive and grossly outdated uniform code, one of them said, “Then come to the P&C meeting and propose to change the uniform”.

“What?!”

“Yeah, the parents can change the uniform if they want to, so if you convince enough people at the meeting to change, go for it”.

So my first lesson was that we parents have a lot more authority and influence over what our kids go through than we realize. Having worked long hours away from home while Eden and Tsoof were in primary school, I had never been close enough to the way schools operated and just assumed…

Inspired by my newly-found power, I immediately started to lobby for a new dress code for the school, something more up-to-date the kids will like to wear. This is when I learned about the many ways in which some people defend their views and how irrational they can be.

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