Week 12
barrier to focus: overstimulation
I am a teacher. I love my students and the act of teaching them, and watching them learn new things, developing new skills, and grow into themselves. I love my students and many, many parts of my job, though it can be challenging at times. The hardest part of my job is consistently one thing: the constant overstimulation.
I’m always delighted to hear about writers who are also teachers, or who once were teachers. Stephen King was briefly a teacher, and I remember reading that in his book On Writing, long before I ever decided to become one. There are two quotes of his about teaching that have stuck with me:
“Want to know the best thing about teaching? Seeing that moment when a kid discovers his or her gift. There’s no feeling on earth like it.”
and…
“Teaching school is like having jumper cables hooked to your brain, draining all the juice out of you.”
King left teaching to take lower paying jobs—though he loved his students and seeing them progress—because teaching drained him of his creative energy to write. Since entering the realm of education at twenty-four, I have worried about this happening to me, and have often wondered if I would be farther along on my creative journey or my desired path to becoming a paid writer if I never started down this path in the first place.
However, there is a case to be made for living, and maybe working on myself as a human is just as important to my writing as working on my writing. Through teaching I have grown and lived and learned about myself, other humans, the world, and I do believe that that is as important to becoming a writer as actually having the time and energy to write. But teaching’s consumption of massive amounts of time, energy and attention— the constant overstimulation where my brain does not have a chance to wander or even be given the chance to be bored for a minute and reset itself— must be an acknowledged barrier to creative focus. The only writing I have ever been successful doing during the school year is the writing I do before my work day begins, and I have made myself wake before 6 am, often at 5 am, in order to make this happen. It is more than I used to do. Still, the most I can write before needing to leave to begin my day is an hour and a half, maybe two hours at best. While I continuously dream of longer writing periods over breaks, when I make it to one of those breaks I face a deep physical and mental exhaustion that makes me feel like I am slowly moving in a trance and about to power down and turn off at any second, like a computer spinning its wheel and needing a hard reset.
I don’t have an answer to combat this overstimulation exhaustion, just that I am trying to do my best working with it. I think for now, that’s all I can do. This brings me to my failures of the week:
failure to anticipate the “minimum effective dose”
One of the things I have learned from Tim Ferriss is the idea of aiming for what he calls the “minimum effective dose” to learn a new skill or accomplish a task. He does not aim for more, he aims for doing the minimum to get the job done. This isn’t about laziness, it’s about not overextending yourself and also about following the 80/20 rule (80% of the results come from 20% of causes). If you aim most of your focus and energy on achieving the 20% that matters most, you’re much more likely to achieve more satisfactory results.
Teachers have a hard enough job as it is, and then we are constantly screwing ourselves with “extras.” I don’t know why the week leading up to break has to be filled with all sorts of “fun” that takes tremendous extra energy to plan and leaves us practically comatose by the time we actually reach our break. Yes, it’s fun for students, but I don’t actually think that’s what it’s about. Our students have just as much fun when they are learning, or when they plan the activities themselves. We also could pace ourselves with these ideas throughout the year, rather than jam-packing them within a few “spirit weeks” leading up to breaks. Every one of us lamented about how this past week has felt like the longest week ever, but maybe it’s our own faults. I definitely can take responsibility for getting myself into a ridiculous situation by volunteering to make 20 pounds of ground beef and at least twice as much rice as we actually ate for Taco Tuesday.
It was an effective wake-up call. How could we restructure our work lives a little bit to empower our students to take a little more ownership, and to focus our work efforts on the 20% of tasks that will mean the most for students, and delegate, pause, or drop the other 80%?
failure to sell an idea
Despite all the books out there on the importance of networking, I think most networking events are actually working against our human nature, not with it. I was trying to brainstorm how we could create collaborative events that were designed to be naturally interactive for aspiring filmmakers, and landed on an abbreviated and adapted version of the 48-hour film festival, where participating teams have 48 hours to create a short film. I love the idea of the 48-hour film festival, but in order to register, you have to already have a team of people willing to make a short film with you. What if people desiring to just have fun, shoot something, and meet new people could do nothing more than sign up and state their desired role, and then were matched with others in complementary roles to meet and make a short film over the course of a day?
I created a proposal, and sent it to one of the city’s film organizations. He very generously wrote back saying it sounded like an idea that would find more success with a youth program. I love the idea of a youth program and thanked him very much for the suggestion, but it still doesn’t solve the problem of connecting all the adults who want to go out and meet people and make something and just need a little help. I’ll keep brainstorming! Reaching out did give me the opportunity to connect with the head of this organization though, and express my continued interest in their production assistant training program.
failure to make another cohort
I got a second rejection notice from another organization for their PA training program. I will significantly study how I can make myself more competitive for the next round, and break it down into small steps I can work on each week.