A Teaching Handbook for Wiccans and Pagans (22 page)

Whatever you do, do not allow the number of incidents of students not doing their work to escalate. It will drag your class to a screeching halt. My student group has been together for many years now, and during that time there have been periods of ennui where students didn't feel motivated or were too wrapped up in whatever was going on in their personal lives to make the class a priority. Groups that stay together over long periods of time ebb and flow in terms of motivation. It's important to address the issue openly with students if you hit one of these lulls, whether your group is long-term or not. It's possible that there is something you can change in the way you're teaching, making assignments, or presenting information that will help motivate them again. It's a two-way street; they have to do the work, but you need to continue to provide them with work that is meaningful to them and good reasons to do it. If they've really lost their motivation, it might be better for them to take a sabbatical and spend some time thinking about what they really want or need.

Students Who Are Chronically Late or Absent

Like students who don't do their work, students who are frequently late or absent can have a big impact on the morale of your class.

To minimize this problem:

• Make sure you're clear up front about your expectations about attendance—what you'll put up with and what you won't—and stick to your guns.
  
• Set up a policy that people need to contact you a certain number of days or hours before class to tell you if they won't be there.
  
• Make sure everyone is aware of the class schedule, and let everyone know about schedule changes as far in advance as you can.
  
• If you are running a long-term group, such as a coven or grove, involve everyone in creating the schedule so their needs are more likely to be accommodated.
  
• Consider posting the schedule online, so people can see it anytime, or using an online calendar, such as Google Calendar. People will still call you at the last minute to ask, “Do we have class tonight?” even if it's posted online in blinking neon lime-green 24-point type, but this should at least reduce these annoying calls.
  

If students are late or absent anyway, it's best to address these issues privately with the students in question. If they've just lost motivation, ask them if they know what might help them get it back. And if they don't think they can recapture it, suggest that they leave the class until they can make a commitment to being there regularly and participating fully.

Although it's best to address the issue privately with students, it's good to let the remaining students know you've done something about it once you have. Students who are responsible and on time get frustrated when they think their teacher isn't dealing with issues of absenteeism. After all, why should they make time in their schedule to be somewhere and put in the effort to be on time if others aren't doing the same thing?

My husband and I asked one student to leave because of chronic absenteeism, and we waited far too long and put up with far too much before we did it. The student was in a period of transition, and we tried to be accommodating, but we bent over too far, and it frustrated and angered some of our other students. They finally ganged up on us and asked us to cut the other student loose—and they were right. Don't let it come to that in your own class. The students shouldn't have to school the teacher.

Emotional Baggage, Disclosure, and Crisis

Let's face it: teaching means dealing with people—and all of the good, the bad, and the ugly that implies. Your interactions with people as a teacher can be limited to presenting information and answering questions, but sometimes when you are teaching spiritual topics, deeper issues rise to the surface.

Students might disclose to you relatively simple things such as anxiety all the way up to revelations of rape, violence, abuse, and neglect—and the events might have happened in the past or could be happening at the time of disclosure. Don't think that because you're working with adults you're less likely to have a student spill deep, dark secrets to you. These issues can come up for any person at any time, regardless of age. And spirituality classes, for better or worse, can be very conducive to encouraging people to talk about their most troublesome problems. Personally I think it's at least partly due to the fact that if you are working your spiritual path, you are trying to better your life, and really doing that means dealing with—or at least letting go of—the unsavory things in your past or present. For some people, moving forward means that those issues will rise to the surface. When this happens, people look to their teachers for support.

When people are deep into exploring their spirituality, just about anything can be a catalyst for unresolved stuff to come to the forefront. For example, when we are working in light trance and accessing different states of consciousness, the part of our brain that keeps everything (seemingly) under control is distracted and/or bypassed, and all sorts of things—both good and bad—can surface.

Melanie Henry told me about meditation bringing up people's issues:

People in our class work up to meditating an hour a day, which in itself will bring up a lot of stuff, plus there are various exercises. We tell people that if they take the class to expect to have your stuff come up—have big things happen. This last class was pretty intense because it was even bigger than usual. One woman went through a divorce. One woman's eldest daughter had a baby that she ended up taking temporary custody of. And a third woman had really severe health problems, unfortunately. Generally the kind of intensity that comes up is that their psychological stuff confronts them because of the meditation.

Along those lines, a student of ours once had a frightening experience during a pathworking meditation. Instead of going to a forest glade or wherever our pathworking led, the student ended up in a bedroom where she had been sexually abused by a relative. We stopped the pathworking while the student was in trance and talked her through it. She couldn't go out the door, because the abuser was in the hall, and she couldn't go out the windows, because they were too high. We told her that in folklore mirrors are sometimes considered doors to other worlds, and that if she climbed up on her dresser and crawled through the mirror as if it were a door, she would end up back in the room with us, and the abuser couldn't follow her. She made it back from the pathworking safely, and we did a debriefing to make sure she and the other students were okay. It was a little scary, but we were proud to see how well she dealt with it.

Please note that I am not saying you shouldn't use meditation and pathworking because it will cause traumatic things to happen. It has actually almost always been the opposite for me; I have found meditation and pathworking to be powerful tools for bettering students' lives. I am merely using them as examples to show the kinds of emotional issues you might have to work through with students.

Chances are at some point you'll end up finding yourself in the role of counselor, whether you're qualified for that or not. You can make it clear, as we have in our classes, that you don't take the “ritual as therapy” approach, where a class or ritual is designed to help students overcome problems they might normally deal with in a therapy session, and that students are expected to handle their emotional issues in a healthy way outside of class, possibly with a therapist. As Melanie Henry put it:

I try to make the point that it's not group therapy. The whole point of this is to work on your own stuff for the purpose of doing ritual.

But even if you draw that boundary, the lines might blur from time to time. Unless you have a background in counseling or therapy, however, it's important to make it clear to students that you're not qualified to counsel them beyond what a knowledgeable friend or family member might do, and to know your limits when it comes to dealing with others' issues. It's crucial to draw this boundary both for them and for you, as Melanie Henry points out:

Teaching takes being able—being willing—to talk endlessly to people who are freaking out, as needed. And also knowing when you have to be able to say no to people. Because while it is important that you be able to counsel people, it can't suddenly be your job to counsel them through x, y, and z. If they need professional counseling help on an ongoing basis, you're not going to be that person for them.

Sometimes there is a personality trait or teaching style that one teacher has that seems to unlock answers for a student in crisis or a “difficult” student, and it appears that that student and that teacher are “meant” to walk their paths together for a time. I have known many Pagan teachers who have been catalysts like that for a student or students, willingly or unwittingly. Although it might feel that you are destined to help a particular student in crisis, don't let that feeling disarm you and cause you to set aside common sense. It might be that you are just the right person present at the right time to help a particular student. But it might also be that your conviction that this is the case gets you in far over your head, and you do more harm to yourself and the student by preventing him or her from getting more experienced help.

As you develop as a teacher, you will learn more about your own strengths and what you can and can't handle in terms of your students' problems. It might develop that you have a knack for dealing with a particular kind of student that others find difficult. But until you learn what your particular area of expertise in dealing with people is—and even afterward—I highly recommend that you keep resources handy to help you handle crises and emotional situations.

It can be very helpful to keep a list of people or organizations you can refer students to, such as the non-emergency police phone number for your area, the local emergency room, crisis hotlines, women's health clinics, shelters, Child Protective Services, drug and alcohol support groups, and Pagan-friendly therapists. Sometimes when someone is distraught, giving them the phone number of someone who can help makes the difference between them seeking help and not seeking it. When you're in crisis, it can seem overwhelming to find help or even look up a phone number yourself. Check out therapists or other mental health professionals before adding them to your list.

In addition, if you know anyone in the Pagan community or outside of it who is used to dealing with people problems and who can serve as a sounding board or mentor for you as you handle a student in crisis, do not hesitate to call on him or her.

Drugs, Alcohol, and Mental Illness

Students who are recovering from drug or alcohol problems or who have mental health issues might benefit greatly from your class, especially if they are working on those issues and trying to get healthy. Spiritual learning or guidance might help keep them on a positive path. There are lots of recovering addicts and people living with and managing mental illness in the Pagan community, and many of them will tell you that their Paganism makes their struggle easier.

On the other hand, addicts and people with mental illness might also ruin your class or destroy your teaching group, depending on how their particular issue affects their behavior and how their behavior affects those around them.

Your personal experience with drugs, alcohol, and mental illness (and by “personal experience,” I mean literally your own experience with those things or having had close friends or relatives who dealt with them, or both) will also color your interactions with people dealing with those issues. Personally, I've had to deal with a lot of addicts in my life. I have the deepest and most profound respect for people who manage to recover from addiction. I believe it is one of the hardest things on earth to do. On the other hand, the behavior of addicts when they're deeply in the throes of addiction—lying, extreme secrecy, emotional withdrawal, erratic behavior, theft, and physical, emotional, and verbal abuse—is extremely destructive, and I don't want to subject myself or my students to it, so addicts who are currently using are not allowed in my group, and we expect everyone to show up for events sober. We consider taking on students who are in recovery and who are not using on a case-by-case basis, just as we do for all students.

We also have some rules about mental illness. Because we have a tight-knit group and we teach out of our home—and because I have seen a few mentally ill individuals wreak havoc on their own lives and the lives of those around them—we ask potential students if they have any mental issues that they need to be taking medication for, what they are, and whether or not they are taking the medication. Our rule is that if a doctor has prescribed you medication, then you need to take it and continue to be under the doctor's care—and to take care of yourself—to be in our class. After that, we take students' mental health issues on a case-by-case basis, based on if or how their issues affect them and the rest of the class.

My husband and I have been presented with more than one opportunity to test what our boundaries are about dealing with students' mental health issues. Once we interviewed a potential student who disclosed that she was schizophrenic. She was very honest and straightforward about it. She was following her doctor's regimen closely, and she was extremely high-functioning, so although we had some reservations, we decided to take her as a student and see how it went. She was a great student—funny, smart, and willing to (gasp!) do her homework—and we liked her a lot and really enjoyed having her in class. But as we got to know her better, we began to wonder if what we were teaching her might actually be harmful to her.

Schizophrenics can have hallucinations and a hard time telling the difference between reality and illusion. When she saw something that she wasn't sure others were seeing, our student used a complex protocol she had created to determine if it was real or a hallucination. We became concerned that what we were teaching—basically using pathworking, energy work, and visualization to sense stuff that doesn't appear to be there when you are using only mundane senses—might confuse or degrade that protocol and make it more difficult for her to function; that what she was doing with us would further blur the line between illusion and reality for her. The more we thought about it, the more frightened we got that we would contribute to making it harder for her to deal with her condition, and that we were not equipped to help her if that happened. So we reluctantly and with great sadness asked her to leave the group.