![\"Chuck](\"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Chuck-Sandy192-150x150.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we want to grow as teachers — we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives — risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract<\/i>,\u201d writes Parker Palmer in The Courage To Teach<\/a>, and so I\u2019d like to tell a story about my continuing journey into wholeness and an undivided life as a teacher and as a person.<\/p>\n At the start of my second year of teaching, I fell into a clinical depression so dark that I wasn\u2019t sure I would get through it. Even getting myself up, dressed, and out of the house was a challenge. Things were that bad. Just when I thought things could not possibly get worse, they did. I was assigned to teach an English Composition course to the freshman members of the university football team.<\/p>\n All these years later, I can still see myself standing in front of that classroom door, trembling with fear as I looked in to see a room full of the biggest, toughest, scariest looking men I\u2019d ever seen gathered in one place. Even under normal circumstances, men like this would have intimidated me. In my depressed state of being, those men terrified me, but somehow I opened that door, walked in and said,\u00a0 \u201cHi. I\u2019m Chuck Sandy, and I\u2019m going to be your teacher this year.\u201d<\/p>\n They looked at me. I looked at them. No one said a word. I bought myself some minutes by organizing my desk and writing the day\u2019s assignment on the board. The silence deepened. I can\u2019t do this<\/i>, I thought, and then I reached down as far into myself as I possibly could, pulled out some words, spoke them out loud, and did it.<\/p>\n Still, for that entire hour my inner voice keep saying, \u201cWhat are you doing, Chuck? You can\u2019t do this. You\u2019re not a teacher. You\u2019re a loser. Tell them you\u2019re sorry. Tell them there\u2019s been some mistake. You\u2019re depressed. Everybody can see that, Chuck. You\u2019re not fooling anyone. It\u2019s as visible to them as it is to you. You can\u2019t do this. Just give up now. There\u2019s no way you\u2019re going to get through this hour.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n And yet, I did get through that hour. Even so, walking across campus after class, I was pretty sure I\u2019d just taught the worst class ever taught in the history of teaching, and completely sure I was an utter failure as a teacher. I was also quite sure I wanted to die. \u00a0Instead, I went to the first class meeting of the Russian Literature in Translation course I was taking, found a seat, got my notebook out, opened my copy of Boris Pasternak\u2019s\u00a0Dr Zhivago<\/a>, and tried my best to hide.<\/p>\n My teacher, Marilyn Bendena – a Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9 who I thought was probably the most elegant, intelligent, and open person I\u2019d ever seen – made hiding difficult, though.\u00a0 She had us sit in a circle. She pulled her chair in close. She looked into each of our eyes, and in a calm, measured voice, began talking about her life. I was mesmerized. \u00a0As I packed up my books at the end of that class, Marilyn looked deep into my eyes and said, \u201cI\u2019m glad you made it, Chuck. I\u2019m so happy you\u2019re here.\u201d<\/p>\n That night I went home, and began reading. I read all night. By morning I\u2019d finished Dr. Zhivago. Yesterday, thirty-two years later, I pulled out the book to see what I\u2019d underlined back then. What I\u2019d underlined was:<\/p>\n \u201cHow wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n \u201cIf you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself \u2026\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n \u201cAnd remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n Two days later, I was back with my football players.\u00a0 As I walked into the room for that second class, one of the biggest and scariest looking guys said, \u201cHey Prof! I got the book! And I did the assignment\u201d and another one said something like \u201cYeah, me too, but that essay you assigned, I could barely get though it. Some of us guys got together and talked about it, though. Man, this class is going to be hard.\u201d<\/p>\n For some reason I said, \u201cLet\u2019s pull the chairs in a circle\u201d and we did. My inner voice was still saying, \u00a0\u201cYou can\u2019t do this. You can\u2019t do this. You can\u2019t do this\u201d <\/i>and yet I did.<\/p>\n The essay that had been assigned was Jacob Bronowski\u2019s The Reach Of Imagination<\/a>, a very difficult and even then rather dated essay that includes these lines:<\/p>\n \u201cAlmost everything that we do which is worth doing is done in the first place in the mind\u2019s eye. The richness of human life is that we have many lives. We live the events that do not happen\u00a0 \u2026 as vividly as those that do, and if thereby we die a thousand deaths, that is the price we pay for living a thousand lives.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n \u201cHey, prof\u201d the biggest, scariest guy said, \u201cIsn\u2019t that like when I\u2019m in bed imagining myself going up against a defensive line of huge muscled-up guys and can\u2019t sleep because I think, like \u2018I\u2019m going to die.\u2019 Is it something like that?\u201d<\/p>\n No, I wanted to say, it\u2019s like me in bed at night imagining that I\u2019m going to have to come in here and teach you because I feel like I\u2019m going to die, but I didn\u2019t say that. I said, \u201cYes, that\u2019s it exactly. What we imagine is as real as what\u2019s actually real.\u201d<\/p>\n That was the most difficult year of my entire life, but I didn\u2019t die. Those big football players weren\u2019t scary at all. They were scared, too, scared like I was though for different reasons, and learning this helped me face them each week, and share with them something of who I was then, too.<\/p>\n Still, I was convinced I was a terrible teacher. Still, I was sure everyone could see how broken I was. Every class was a challenge, every day a struggle to get through, and yet I did. At the end of the course, several of those big men lifted me up high in the air, threw me up with three cheers, and told me what a great class it had been.<\/p>\n One day during that Russian Literature course with Marilyn Bendena, she invited me to her office for coffee, and asked me if I was OK. I broke into tears and before I could say a word, she hugged me and told me that I\u2019d be all right. Then she told me about her own struggles, helped me get the professional help I needed, gave me a copy of Tolstoy\u2019s War and Peace, and told me to read it. I did. I got the help I needed and read all 1400 pages of that book. By the time I finished, I was feeling better.<\/p>\n That was the year having a class of big football players to teach, reading Russian literature, and being lucky enough to have Marilyn Bendena as my own teacher saved my life. That was the year I started becoming the teacher I am now, and the person I am still very much in the process of becoming.<\/p>\n The last time I ever saw Marilyn, she gave me a copy of Boris Pasternak\u2019s poem, After The Storm<\/a> which has these lines at its center:<\/p>\n The gutters overflow; the change of weather\u2028<\/i> An artist’s hand, with mastery still greater\u2028<\/i> Feel free to replace the word \u201cartist\u201d with the word \u201cteacher\u201d if you wish.<\/p>\n Parker Palmer writes,\u00a0 \u201cAfraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living\u00a0divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the \u2018integrity that comes from being what you are\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n I still suffer from bouts of depression from time to time. I still experience times of brokenness when I feel far from whole, yet I continue to learn, teach, grow, and live. What\u2019s changed mostly is that I\u2019m no longer afraid of being visible, no longer afraid of speaking the truth about who I am and who I\u2019m becoming, and so I tell you this story. I hope someday, you\u2019ll share yours. Here\u2019s to the undivided life.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Connect with Chuck and other iTDi Associates, Mentors, and Faculty by joining iTDi Community. Sign Up For A Free iTDi Account<\/a> to create your profile and get immediate access to our social forums and trial lessons from our English For Teachers<\/a> and Teacher Development<\/a> courses.<\/p>\n The Undivided Life – Chuck Sandy \u201cIf we want to grow as teachers — we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives — risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract,\u201d writes Parker Palmer … Continue reading More Whole Teacher – Chuck<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1908,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-more-whole-teacher"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4150\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nMakes all you see appear alive and new.<\/i>
\nMeanwhile the shades of sky are growing lighter,<\/i>
\nBeyond the blackest cloud the height is blue.<\/i>
\n\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n
\nWipes dirt and dust off objects in his path.<\/i>
\nReality and life, the past and present,<\/i>
\nEmerge transformed out of his colour-bath<\/i>.<\/p>\nLike what we do? Become an iTDi Patron<\/a>.
\nYour support makes a difference.<\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"