Welcome!

It's tough to be an introvert in an extrovert world, especially in an extrovert's profession, like teaching. Through this blog, I'd like to share my own and others' reflections on being an introvert in the classroom. This isn't a place for misanthropes or grumps, though; I hope to thoughtfully discuss the challenges that introverts face in schools and celebrate the gifts that introverted teachers and students bring to the educational environment. If you can relate, please join me!

Friday, July 19, 2013

"I don't even want to open a freakin' book."

I remember a fellow grad student at CSUN, whose bluntness used to both intrigue and flummox me, giving me this line as a description of how she felt after a day of teaching. For introverts, it's simply exhausting. The definition of an introvert is someone who gets energy from inward thoughts, and when you have to be outwardly focused all day, this is draining. While extroverts get pumped up from being the center of attention, we introverts get tired, even though we care deeply about our students and like what we are doing.

But I think what my classmate was saying goes further than being too exhausted to read or write. I think it has to do with mentally switching gears. Admittedly, I have OCD, so switching gears is not my strong suit, but recently a person without OCD confirmed to me that we feel that if we immerse ourselves into the world of thought one evening, we find it harder to "be fully present" with our students the next day. We're preoccupied with that world in our minds that we opened up and delved into, and our thoughts keep wandering back to that other place.

Beyond being "somewhere else" psychologically, I also felt vulnerable. If I looked deeply into my own or someone else's thoughts by writing or reading, and then the next morning had to face the feisty fifteen-year-olds, I felt oddly exposed, like I was wearing all my emotions on my sleeve.

I bet most of us English teachers have had a colleague say to us, "I don't know how some English teachers don't read books during the school year!" and we nod and pretend we don't know either, when, in fact, we know very well. While it's fairly easy for me to switch gears now and I regularly devour books during the school year (I even started this blog in a November, one of the busiest months of the school year), it was a long way to get that point. It took about ten years.

When I first started teaching, I needed to stay ready for the next day of cultivating an extroverted version of myself. So when I got home, I tried to do things that would keep me relaxed and laughing. I didn't have cable then, so I had only a few channels, and one of them played lots of reruns of That '70s Show. To this day, Fez and the Foreman family are some of my favorite people.

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