Month: February 2012

Grief, Gender, and Ecology at Work

Haig Chahinian

We were totally excited recently to come across Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, a performance group firmly grounded in the 2010s. Part social commentators and part Nina Simone-inspired musicians, AATJ was spotlit in the Village Voice on the eve of Swanlights, their MOMA-commissioned performance at Radio City Music Hall.

In the Voice interview, English-born and transgender Hegarty reflects on the world he inhabits, and touches us at our core. In one moment — among many — of poignance, he relates his experience as a transgender person with the ecological devastation he sees:

“I see them as parallel issues, as a tiny reflection of a greater problem,” he notes. “Even as a transgender person, I’m excruciatingly aware of my privilege as a white male, and the subjugation of women is critical to understanding the subjugation and destruction of the ecology.”

Brilliance! See him working the dual oppressor and oppressed within him?  He continues:

“America is less willing to consider a gay or transgender having a platform outside of gender identity,” he says. “But we are barely acknowledging that the weather is changing, either.”

Say it, Antony. Americans’ purported less-willingness to see the world broadly can lead to pigeonholing one another, and to misperceiving the continuing transformation of Earth’s geography. He’s grounded in his emotions when he says, “We need to start grieving, at the very least.”

And then he drops a profound mind-bender:

“People can more easily imagine the collapse of the world than they can imagine stepping away from capitalism or patriarchy.”

We’ve been thinking about this idea ever since we first read it. Do you think it’s true, that capitalism and preserving the world can’t coexist? While it pains our brain to ponder, it’s certainly worthwhile to consider.

Still, he seems hopeful when he thinks about his ethnicity and place in the world. “I am as American as it gets,” he shares.

And we remain hopeful, too. Not only about our ability to solve some of these worldly problems, but hopeful that revealing our whole selves at work, as Antony does, will help lead us there.

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Teachers Benefit from Revealing Themselves

Haig Chahinian

We often blog from the library of a graduate school of education, and recently we overheard an earful. A frustrated student teacher was talking with his peers about their high school students, and we gathered three (3) main points:

  1. He’s finding it increasingly hard to keep order in the classroom.
  2. Too many students have been prescribed psychotropic medication to manage behavioral issues.
  3. He’s devastated that his grandmother is seriously ill, and he’s trying to “be professional” and “hold it together” when he’s with his students.

If we were bold enough to approach him, we would have said this:

In light of your despair regarding your grandmother’s condition, why must you “hold it together” in class? Why not share your pain with your students? By revealing your current emotional experience, you accomplish so much:

  • You humanize your authority, which can help your students better relate to you. Being able to relate to you correlates with empathizing more with you, and your feelings. And nurturing your students’ ability to empathize may be the most important gift you give them, ever.
  • You unburden yourself from the unproductive work of “holding it together.” When you can share of your self without fear, you’re more relaxed. When you’re relaxed, you have more energy to listen actively to your students, who hunger for your focused attention.
  • The more nurturing you are with your students, and the more you listen to them, the closer you may feel as a class. From here, the difficulties of “keeping order in the classroom” may become more manageable.

If at this point he hasn’t scowled at us for butting in, we’d ask him where he learned that teachers are more professional when they hide who they are.

Get this: we know a school which is incorporating into the junior high school curriculum one teacher’s plan to donate part of his liver to his father. At this same school, another teacher shares with each new class his story of being adopted, so students can understand the complexities of different family structures over a lifespan.

Pretty revolutionary, yes? To publicize these seemingly private aspects of our lives in service of educating today’s youth is a radical–and totally effective–way to teach.

It may be challenging to implement at first, yet teachers who strive to share some intimate details of their lives will reap tangible benefits.

You follow, oh student teacher in the graduate school library?

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