Tooth Removed, Trauma Revealed

When I was 15, the night before the finals of a junior high basketball tournament, I had a dream about playing in that game. While dreaming, I violently slammed my face on the window sill next to my bed, abruptly awakening to a bloody mess, a gashed lip and broken front tooth. The next morning, I saw our family dentist who cleaned the wound, bandaged it, and sent me off in time to play in the game. Our team won. And I played one of my best games ever.

Over the years, this tooth has offered several reminders of the trauma. First, about 11 years after the event, while living in a remote Alaska Native village, a painful abscess developed resulting in an emergency trip by small plane to Bethel where a pipe smoking, hippie dentist lanced the abscess and performed a root canal. Ten years later, the root canal failed so I had it redone and a crown installed. Then, early this fall, 36 years after the original incident, the revised root canal also failed, leading to an extraction just three weeks ago.

The dentist who pulled my tooth encouraged me to use IV-sedation, saying "this is the type of procedure we usually do with sedation." I declined, ostensibly because I wanted to work immediately after the procedure and needed to be alert. However, the primary benefit of not undergoing sedation did not reveal itself until the procedure was underway and I realized this was something I did not want to miss.

While the tooth was being extracted, I heard loud crunching and cracking as the crown broke into little pieces and fell into the back of my throat. I felt intense pressure as he ripped out a part of me deeply embedded in flesh and bone, so close to my brain. I had dreaded the procedure, but interestingly, when in it, instead of resisting, I found myself releasing, giving in, attempting to "help him" remove the tooth. When it finally popped out, he held it up and said matter-of-factly, "Well, here is the problem."

After the procedure, I sat alone in the reclining chair. I washed out my mouth then stood up to leave the operatory. I noticed a table behind the chair, and there I saw the blood-stained, lifeless tooth peacefully laying on a tray surrounded by soiled gauze and metal dental instruments. I felt an urge to pick the tooth up and take it with me as a keepsake, a memento of sorts. Instead, I just looked at it and begin to feel an unexplained sense of regard, a strange kind of reverence. I stood there for a moment, then walked away leaving the tooth behind.

On one level, this was simply a tooth that had gone bad: "here is the problem." Yet my reaction, what I experienced during and after the procedure that day, suggests I'd also attached a story to it. I don't grasp the fullness of that story, what it means or has to tell me, if anything. Perhaps my work is to drop it, let it go and just see the tooth for what it is, or was. Or maybe it would be useful to listen to the story, explore it, unpack it... I don't know. But I do know the tooth is gone, and I am beginning to feel better.

For New Teachers

I often teach a seminar for preservice teachers during their final semester at the university. As I was preparing for the last session this spring, I found myself rehearsing what I wanted to tell them, ideas about how to teach that were likely not taught in their university teacher education curriculum. Although I decided to not share these thoughts with my students, below is a draft version of what I wanted to say.

Take your stand as teacher. As a new teacher you likely feel unsure about your ability teach, manage a classroom, work with children, etc. Regardless of these normal insecurities and doubts, is essential that you fully accept your role as teacher. Your students do not need you be their friend or parent, they need to you be their teacher.

This reminds me of a story Koun Franz told about advice he received just before beginning to serve as priest at the Anchorage Zen Community. He wrote:

In 2006, when I was preparing to move to Anchorage, one of my teachers sat me down and offered this advice: “Always stand in your position.” What he meant, essentially, was to accept the role of being a priest, not to apologize for it. It’s easy to refuse to sit in the high seat, to laugh at the silliness of having everyone bow in your direction, to wink and say in a thousand little ways, “Don’t worry—I know we’re just playing. I’m just like you.” People practically beg you to do it. But my teacher’s stance was, and is, that deep down, people do not want the priest to be just like them. They want that person to have the strength to sit in the position of the Buddha, unflinchingly, and to speak and act from that place. Because who else will do that? 

(http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wildfoxzen/2012/01/standing-in-ones-position.html)

In a similar way, your students need you to take your stand as their teacher, to “speak and act from that place.”

Meet your students as complete, right now. Contemporary education focuses on the future and students are portrayed as lacking what they most need for future success. Teachers are told their job is to fill this deficit by giving students knowledge and skills needed to succeed in college, jobs, and the marketplace, all in the future. In this way, education is separated from students’ present lives and sends them the message that what is happening right now is really that what is important.

John Dewey (1929) offered a radically different view when he wrote:

Education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. The school must represent life—life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground. (“My Pedagogic Creed”)

Preparing students for the future is certainly part of what you do, but this effect of your efforts does not negate the importance of meeting your students as complete human beings and honoring the process of living right now.

Come back to the present. When feeling overwhelmed by the busyness of the day—lesson preparation, grading, paperwork—and pressures to meet students’ many needs and demands, bring yourself back to the present moment. This can be as simple as noticing your breath, seeing the color of a kid’s shoe, or spotting sunlight streaming in through the window. This is not an escape strategy, nor will it magically make the challenges go away. However, it can create a space where you are more likely to mindfully meet your students and tasks, to fully attend to the busyness of the day. 

Embody what you teach. Your actions—what you do and how you do it—are your most powerful pedagogy. Therefore, pay attention to how you stand, walk, sit; the way you open the classroom door; what and how you speak to a child; and how you react to a parent wanting to talk. Show your students curiosity, openness, and critical thinking by the way you think in front of them. If you want students to treat themselves and others with respect and dignity, you, as their teacher, must embody these ways of being.  

Anything-Nothing

My 4-year-old daughter says "anything" for "nothing." Today I asked her, "What do you have in your hand?" Her reply, "Anything." Last week, when she and a friend were playing, I asked, "What are you doing?" Again, she said, "Anything."

Her word choice may simply be a 4-year-old's confusion, or a sign of language development that will soon mature and self-correct. However, each time I hear her, she cuts through my view that something "is" or "is not." It can't be both at the same time--you either have something in your hand or you do not. But for her, it could be "anything," which leaves open all possibilities, including "nothing."

...Form does not differ from emptiness, 
emptiness does not differ from form. 
Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself form.
(From the Heart Sutra)