To Give What You Never Had: Teaching with Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria
“OKAY,” I shouted, “EVERYONE SIT DOWN NOW AND CLOSE YOUR MOUTHS.” Students stopped talking, exchanged glances, and moved to their assigned seats. Normally I’d have been hesitant to use such a harsh tone, but I knew I had no other choice. I had lost control of the class, and I was about to lose control of myself.
The activity for the day was a variation on “speed dating.” Students rotated between desk. At each pair of desks was a question for them to debate. The point was to practice taking on positions we might not normally agree with while focusing on ethos, pathos, and logos. But instead, kids were just socializing and walking around.
The situation was completely my fault. I should have modeled the process more, taking the time to ensure everyone knew exactly what they were going to do, why they were going to do it, and how they could be successful.
I surveyed the scene as students slumped back to their seats. “LET’S GO” I commanded the stragglers. Thankfully the slow-motion ambulation characteristic of middle schoolers gave me the time I needed to breathe and unclench my body. “What’s going on?” I asked when I was calm enough to speak confidently. “Why aren’t you doing what I told you to do?” A hand shot up immediately. It was Mike, a quick-witted kid with a well-earned reputation of telling it like it is.
“Well,” he began without the slightest hint of trepidation or malice, “maybe if you acted more like an authority figure, we might respect you more?”
It took every ounce of restraint I had to remain calm and in control in the face of such withering criticism. Mike was right, of course. Students are pretty much always right when it comes to judgments about their teachers.
I thanked Mike for his feedback, told the class to read silently while I took care of something, and walked/ran to the staff bathroom. I needed a moment to push back the tidal wave of shame threatening to upend my insides. I leaned against the door and counted my breathing. IN 1-2-3-4 HOLD 1-2-3-4 OUT 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8. The walk of shame back to my classroom set the tone for the rest of the day. I did not try the activity again with my remaining class periods.
What Mike said to me that day was a powerful turning point in my development as a teacher. The memory is never far from my brain or heart. In fact, I purposely keep it close. I use it as a daily reminder to be more assertive than I think I should be. I hold all of my failures close. My brain shuffles through every mistake it can remember like a slideshow, each one a painful but useful reminder of what not to do.
This is what it feels like to be a teacher who suffers from Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. According to ADDitude magazine, Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is the
extreme emotional sensitivity and pain triggered by the perception that a person has been rejected or criticized by important people in their life. It may also be triggered by a sense of falling short — failing to meet their own high standards or others’ expectations.
As I mentioned in my previous post on Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, I’m not entirely sure RSD is even “real.” All I know is that nothing else captures how I feel on a daily basis so accurately as RSD.
Like many folks with RSD, I spent much of my childhood trying to figure out how to please the folks around me. I learned that the best way to reduce my chance of being hurt was to keep a running tally of everything I did that was “wrong.” That way I would never be caught off guard by a mistake. I worked assiduously to master my failure. I calibrated my perception to always keep one eye trained towards the horizon, hoping in vain that if I just hated myself enough no one else would be able to hurt me. I would “train” myself by demanding whoever my girlfriend was at the time to list all the people she thought were better looking at me. Over and over again I would ask questions that I knew would elicit painful responses. By the time I left high school, I was frighteningly adept at picking myself apart and isolating the tiny pieces of myself to loathe.
I never imagined this tendency of mine would help me as a teacher, but it does. This is because in many ways our public schools start from the proposition that children are broken and need to be fixed. It’s like taking RSD and operationalizing it for millions of children. Therefore, teaching with RSD is a brutal, raw, and affecting experience. It is good and bad, expansive and crushing. Although the downsides to working within a space that seems hellbent on making you feel like shit are numerous, so are the benefits. My RSD helps me “see” kids who might feel invisible.
Some of the ways that school triggers my RSD are totally irrational and illogical. When a kid doesn’t like the book I recommend to them, for instance. Or if a student I know walks by without waving. Minor stuff that means nothing in the larger scheme of things. But experienced through my RSD filter, even the most quotidian moments can create profound feelings of shame.
Sometimes the triggers make (a little bit) more sense. Staff meetings that act like the only thing standing between us and some fictive utopia of student achievement is teachers’ inability to work harder. Or teacher observations and evaluations that feel like little more than extended exercises in “GOTCHA!” bureaucracy where absent-mindedly forgetting to write the agenda on the board carries the same administrative weight as showing up with no lesson at all.
This stuff hurts like hell, but it’s trivial. It’s what’s being done TO students and oftentimes WITH students that triggers my RSD the most. This is where schooling’s deficit ideology really gets to breathe and flex. I’m asked to give bullshit tests that measure nothing meaningful and confer unearned feelings of superiority to some at the expense of others. I’m supposed to reprimand developmentally appropriate adolescent behavior just because it falls outside the narrow range of white, middle class norms.
The things I’ve just described might not seem particularly problematic. Perhaps it feels like I’m over exaggerating. School is school, right? Grades, tests, competition, it’s all part of the package. After all, plenty of kids don’t mind taking tests or getting grades or anything else I mentioned above. But some kids do.
Don’t believe me? Just listen to the building and you’ll hear it. Walk the hallways during classes and you’ll see it. The kids sitting together at lunch picking themselves apart and obsessing over the best way to shrink their bodies. The kid choking back tears because they failed another science test and know what’s waiting for them at home. The army of children lining up outside math teachers’ doors during lunch period begging to give up the only free time they get all day just to eek out a few more points on an assignment.
To be a teacher with RSD is to be a container for 130 individual sets of hurts. It means helping kids pick up the pieces of their broken hearts when we can find them and helping to refashion new ones when we can’t.
The situation isn’t all suffering, though.
The hyper-vigilance I developed at a young age improves my ability to work with and understand middle schoolers. Early teenagers are often anxious and hesitant to take the intellectual risks required of deep, meaningful learning. They’re moody and sensitive. Above all else, they hate to mess up in front of their peers. So, in other words, they’re just like me. I get wrapped up in middle grade friendship and young adult romance the way they do. I understand on a deep emotional level that even the tiniest of flubs can feel like the world’s greatest insult. Everything feels so important and so meaningful and so fresh.
In my classroom, this sensitivity plays an essential role in how I run the class. I control almost every variable. I ditched grades, quizzes, and tests. The feedback I give students focuses on helping them see “what works” in their writing rather than giving them a laundry list of mistakes to fix. I welcome students who come to class late instead of berating them with an eye-roll lecture about being on time in the “real world.” I change seating arrangements every two weeks and use community building activities because kids need opportunities to make connections and the skills required to grow them.
When it comes to my lesson plans, teaching with RSD feels like having a set of invisible wires connecting everyone in the room to my brain and heart. I try to know what every single student is doing during every second of my class. And just like my old girlfriends, I demand constant feedback from my students. WHAT ISN’T WORKING? WHAT WOULD YOU DO INSTEAD? I continuously tinker with instructions and activities because a part of me will always assume that the perfect lesson is just a few iterations around the corner. It’s not, of course, but my RSD refuses to believe that.
If any of this sounds braggadocios, know that my RSD precludes me from taking any sort of lasting pride, joy, or satisfaction in my work. Nothing is ever good enough, and I don’t mean in the “LET’S TAKE IT FROM GOOD TO GREAT!” corporate mentality that infects so many public institutions. I mean that running away from failure is not the same thing as pursuing success.
The fact that I’m able to wield such influence over my classroom is only possible because classrooms are arranged like tiny fiefdoms within the larger kingdom of school. I’ve used this to my advantage, submitting every granular detail to my obsessive gaze, in order to give my students the kind of place I wish I had when I was their age. I can give them what I never had growing up.
“Patient” and “caring” are two descriptors regularly used by my students to describe me. My classroom is warm. It’s a place where many students often report feeling less pressure than their other classes. Some have gone so far as to characterize my pedagogy of sensitivity as an oasis, a respite from the scorching pressure around them. Obviously not every kid I teach shares such rosy sentiments. Some kids miss the competition of other classes, the cut-throat individualism that our country promulgates so well. Kids like Mike push me to create a classroom that really feels like it’s a place for everyone.
The classroom is a space where I’m free to be myself, too. Teaching grants me a brief, merciful respite from the internal conflagration keeps my synapses alight and ensures I never feel comfortable. This is why I spend so much time on my lessons and my instructions and my policies and my tone and my body language. I want everything to be perfect and purposeful.
While I want every student to feel successful and confident, I design for the most sensitive, self-critical, and perfectionistic among us. I know how words can hurt. I know how easy it is to internalize a deficit mindset. I know how easy it is for these deficit mindsets to metastasize to the point where they can never be removed. Therefore I use my total control over every variable to build a world that feels not necessarily good, but right. A place that makes it easier to remember my humanity and the humanity of my students.
Since I’m working with other human beings, perfection is impossible. This works to my advantage. It means I’m able to harness my Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria’s relentless drive for improvement in a way that benefits students. Teaching forces my RSD to work for me.
