A Teaching Handbook for Wiccans and Pagans (17 page)

If you still end up with a wide range of abilities in your class, there are several things you can do to try to ensure that all of the students get what they need.

For partner and small-group activities, try to have less advanced students work with average and more advanced ones. The less advanced students will benefit from the more advanced students' knowledge, and the more advanced students can learn a lot from watching someone else learn something they already have some familiarity with.

Try to give assignments that can be done at varying levels of difficulty. Add extra components to assignments for more advanced or average students who want the challenge.

In some cases, you can also have advanced and average students help teach the less advanced ones. This is a way to give advanced students a little bit of exposure to teaching others.

Do not try to bring the difficulty level of the class “down” to the level of the less advanced students unless they are the majority of the class. Students will almost always try to reach the bar you set for them; it's better to set it a little too high and provide a lot of support to help them get there than to set it too low. As Sarah Davies put it:

Brian and I found that the higher level of expectation we have for students, the more effort they tend to put in, and we were surprised at the great work they can do.

If you're comfortable giving out contact information, make sure students have a way to reach you between classes for extra support.

Handling Difficult Personalities
During a Presentation

Most teachers have a war story or two about people who disrupted their classes, either on purpose or unwittingly. The last thing you need when you are making a presentation is someone being distracting or
trying
to pull the class off track, but it can happen to even the most experienced teachers.

One way to deal with difficult people is to simply decide beforehand that you're not going to tolerate disruptive behavior. This sounds obvious, but it is far easier said than done; in the moment, with an entire class watching, many people find it difficult to confront someone who is being disruptive or belligerent. However, your other students deserve to have a class session free from that person's negativity, so it's important to shut it down if you can. Ellen Evert Hopman said:

In the past what I would do is I would try to be very nice. I would kind of suppress myself and let them talk, and hope that they would calm down, but as I have gotten older, I'm less patient. Somebody gives me a hard time, I just tell them to leave. It used to not be like that, but life is too short. There's not much time left, and as Oberon Zell likes to say, “If you don't want it, you can't have any.”

Christopher Penczak doesn't tolerate disruption either:

Those who are maliciously difficult or seeking to prove superiority aren't as much of a problem anymore. I feel I've been doing this long enough to be deft enough to usually take their legs out from under them. First you try to see if it's a genuine misunderstanding or question and respond accordingly, even if it's from someone seeking counseling rather than education. But when it's purposely disruptive, I have no patience for it. I am all for people having their own opinion, and if someone approaches me before, after, or on a break, I might even have coffee to chat about differences of opinion, training, or philosophy, but when someone wants to turn a class into their own personal forum to pontificate, argue, and receive attention to the detriment of everyone else, I have to shut it down. I've found that holding fewer publicly open and free workshops cuts down on that, as not many problem-makers want to pay for the pleasure of being an ass and being asked to leave.

And T. Thorn Coyle gave me the following advice about dealing with disruptive or rude people online—but the principle is a great one, and it works in person too:

I often try firm kindness first. If that doesn't work, they are blocked. There just isn't the energy to spare on people who don't wish to make a positive contribution to discussion. Disagreement is fine, rudeness is unacceptable. The reason I try firm kindness first is that sometimes the person is having a bad day, and given the opportunity to correct themselves, they will. That has happened many times—even garnering apologies—which is a teaching for me to not jump to too many conclusions.

Patrick McCollum suggests that one of the best ways to handle disruption is to really know your stuff and to turn it back on the disrupter:

Know about what it is that you're teaching so that a person actually can't disrupt you. Because if a person challenges something that you're saying or trying to share, if you know ten times more about it than the person who is challenging you and you're a little bit diplomatic, it takes a very short period of time to have that person become less disruptive and more respectful and silent if you throw some questions back to them about what they're challenging and it's a question they can't answer.

Once I was speaking in a bookstore about using the moon in astrological timing, and I was describing the moon void-of-course. Many astrologers will speak about the planets as if they were people to avoid some of the technical jargon and explain the planetary movements in a way non-astrologers can relate to. I was doing that and referring to the moon as a “she.” Most of the people in the room were following along, but one woman—whose friends had dragged her to the class, and who for the entire presentation had been crossing her arms and scowling at me under furrowed brows as if she were trying to kill me with her gaze alone—interrupted me and said sarcastically and with a dramatic eye roll, “Can you please explain that without anthropomorphizing?” I wasn't sure if she thought I was incapable of explaining it another way or if she felt my personification was insulting her intelligence, so I just said, “Sure! The technical explanation is…” and rattled off a nice jargon-laden definition, followed by “And another way of looking at it is…” followed by another explanation in lay terms, without the personification. That shut her up, and she even uncrossed her arms, relaxed a little, and asked me some non-sarcastic questions later.

If someone in your class is being a general nuisance, you can ask him or her outright what's going on: “So-and-so, I see that you're agitated/upset/fidgety/restless/talking to others. Do you have a question or a problem we should address?” Often you can stop people who are causing problems in a class by simply acknowledging them. If the person is questioning your authority or knowledge, you can back up your statements and give sources, if possible. This is one reason why I encourage you to try to anticipate questions students might have and come prepared with answers. If you do choose to address the person's issue during the class, don't let it derail you or take up too much class time. You can always offer to talk to the person after the class or put the question or issue in the parking lot to be dealt with at the end of the session.

One way to deal with people who try to throw you off balance is by unbalancing them back. Stephanie Raymond likes this technique:

I also really like to break the scripts—like, what's the last thing that somebody expects me to say in agreement or in response to a confrontational question. That's a really good opportunity to say, “Let's have this conversation…why do people think this way, and where are your concerns rooted?” I just kind of unpack it a little bit, and sometimes that makes people more belligerent because they don't want to go any deeper than just trying to throw you off balance. So if you can throw them off balance back by saying something totally off the wall back at them that somehow relates to the topic, that often will make people laugh…. If the original person is just sort of trolling and wanting to make trouble, that's not the response they wanted, and so it tends to shut them down.

She also points out that challenging questions can be a learning opportunity for both her and her class:

Very often I find that when somebody does challenge something, what they do is remind me of a piece of the topic I forgot to mention or wanted to include.… And then when they bring it up, I can thank them for reminding me of another piece that I wanted to add and get a discussion going. I think often when someone confronts you, and you're the expert, and nobody else in the room identifies themselves in that way, the people get really quiet and think, “What are you going to do? How's she gonna deal with this?” And to invite other
people
to participate on an equal playing field is a good technique to defuse things.

If you have two people side-talking, there are several things you can do. As with the single disrupter, you can address it directly: “Do either of you have a question or comment?” If you're in a classroom situation, you can simply wander around the room as you talk, linger right next to the side-talkers, and talk right over them; they usually take the hint. Another option—it's kind of the nuclear option, actually, but it works—is to stop speaking and look directly at the side-talkers while you wait patiently for them to stop talking. The rest of the class will start looking at them too. When they realize they're the center of attention, they will almost always stop immediately and usually have the good sense to be embarrassed.

It's possible—although I wouldn't count on it—that your students will take care of a disruptive person or people for you. Pete “Pathfinder” Davis told me a story about some of his students quieting a woman who was determined to ruin one of his classes:

There was a woman who came and insisted on witnessing to us. I'm teaching from a stool in the front of the classroom, and I tried to address her concerns and wasn't getting anywhere, and finally I was getting a little frustrated, and I stopped, trying to collect my thoughts, and the students took off on her, and they started asking her embarrassing questions about “If this is the case, the Bible says that, then why do you do this?” and they pretty much got her to leave. When I realized what was happening, I just sat there on the stool and watched. They all said essentially the same thing: “If you want to teach your religion, talk to the front office and maybe they'll give you the opportunity as part of this program, but we've paid for
this
and we want to hear what
this
man has to say.”

Of course, not everyone who asks difficult questions or is distracting in a class is doing it on purpose. Some people will simply not agree with you and feel the need to say so. Stephanie Raymond says:

While good instructor methodology means that everybody's going to get your message and understand what you're saying, that doesn't mean that they're going to accept it or believe it or agree with it, and that's okay.

And sometimes people are distracting because of a lack of social or self-regulation skills. Christopher Penczak told me:

Many difficult personalities are due to overenthusiasm and excitement. Some people can't control their sharing, or find the appropriate venue for sharing…. One class forced me to do a variation on the talking stick. We had a talking crystal ball, smoky quartz for grounding. It was for one particular person and the rest of the class knew it, but it gave me a mechanism for keeping her in line for a long-term class where she was otherwise thriving, without getting personal or hurting her feelings. She had the “me too” syndrome. As everybody shared, she would then share, so she had twelve turns to share and everybody else had one. After the initial seven-week session, we were able to discontinue the talking crystal ball for level two.

Humor is a great tactic too. Laughter is a great way to bring a group back together and enhance a sense of camaraderie—as long as you're not laughing at someone in the group.

Ethics and Boundaries

So far in this chapter we've been talking about the more direct things you can do to interact well with students. But there are some less direct and more subtle—but equally important—things you can also do that will greatly enhance your ability to build healthy relationships with students. Two of these are (a) defining and following your own code of teaching ethics, and (b) creating and enforcing strong boundaries with students.

Ethics and boundaries help you build a philosophical base that can give you solid footing and smart, respectful guidance as you navigate the complicated experience that is teaching others in a spiritual context. Your ethics and boundaries create a code of conduct that will inform how you treat and communicate with students.

Your Personal Ethical Code

Everyone derives their ethics from somewhere, and often from several “somewheres.” Some people try to live by the values their parents or families instilled in them. Others try to live by their personal interpretation of the Wiccan Rede or Threefold Law. And others simply try to live in a manner they believe would honor their gods. You probably have a good sense of your own personal ethics and values; they've probably been tested throughout your life through choices you've had to make and interactions you've had with others.

Before you dive into teaching, examine or reassess your own personal code of ethics and think about how it would apply in teaching situations. For example, if you have a personal rule that says you try to treat
others
as you would like to be treated, how does that work specifically in a teaching context? How does it apply to how you teach and interact with students?

As you're doing this, it's imperative to think about the power differential and how it adds new layers to situations in which you might have to apply your code of ethics. In teaching, the power differential refers to the imbalance in power between the student and teacher. The teacher is in a position of authority, and that makes the student at least a little bit vulnerable. Even if we are teaching people our own age who have similar knowledge to us or whom we know well, they are not exactly peers as long as we are in the teacher-student relationship.