You'd think I'd know myself better by now...

I brought all kinds of student work with me upstate for this Breath-Body-Mind teacher training workshop that I'm doing--and of course I realize I'm not going to even look at it. Even thinking about it increases my anxiety levels about a thousand-fold, so ... no. I'm not quite sure where the anxiety and resistance come from; it's not like I don't know what I'm facing or how to handle it. This is just situation normal: some of the work will be good, some will be awful--but it's at the point in the semester when I don't need to drive myself nuts trying to shift anything better: they've gotten all my feedback, so now it's just about them using what they've learned to work on themselves.

Kinda like what I'm doing up here. But in a really nifty turn of events, one of the organizers--not even one of the teachers--had great ideas. I mentioned the panic response students have--especially in the comp classes--when faced with their first assignments, and he suggested that their first writing assignment of the term should be to write as badly as they can imagine writing: make every mistake they can think of to make, break every rule, really suck on purpose. I'm not sure how the students would respond to that, as so many of them think they suck no matter what--intentionally or not--but it's certainly worth trying, just to see if it would loosen up anything in them.

The other idea was that I can present a calmer, less daunting persona to the class the first day (or days) if I do some of my Breath-Body-Mind practice immediately before entering the classroom. So often I see the students almost recoil when I first walk in, as if they were expecting a mere teacher and instead are faced with a dragon--a friendly and smiling dragon, but nonetheless.... That's a bit of an overstatement, but it certainly can't hurt me to practice reducing my own stress, anxieties, tensions, before I walk into the classroom.

In fact, it can't hurt me to practice reducing all that stuff period. So even if I never end up teaching the BBM stuff, it sure is great to learn.

I get to be a student again all day tomorrow, then drive home and settle into being home before I go back to wearing my dragon disguise.