C hapter 10

A Few Possible Pitfalls

There are some traps that even the best teachers are vulnerable to falling into, and many of them sneak up on us when we’re distracted and looking the other way. Often, as teachers, we’re so busy dealing with the little things—the details, the day-to-day issues that arise—that we don’t look at the bigger picture, and we don’t see problems brewing until they’ve taken a firm hold.

However, as grandmothers are fond of saying, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If you know about some of the possible problems you might encounter, you are more likely to be able to avoid or minimize them. The point of this chapter isn’t to frighten you away from teaching but rather to help you recognize and ward off problems before they get out of hand.

Your Best Defense:
Not Avoiding Conflict

The challenges you might encounter as a teacher might be simple, or they might be complex and complicated, but almost all of them will require you to communicate clearly with students about the problem and not avoid conflict. These situations usually require that most dreaded of teacher-student communications: the “difficult conversation,” otherwise known as calling them on their crap (or them calling you on yours) and coaching them to work through whatever the problem is. And it’s your job as the teacher to make sure that the difficult conversation happens and things aren’t left to fester.

For the record, I hate having this kind of conversation. I always figured that was a result of my personal baggage, because I’m a proper passive-aggressive Midwesterner who dislikes confrontation. But it didn’t take me long to discover that a lot of teachers—maybe even most teachers—hate it as much as I do. However, we can’t bury our heads in the sand and avoid confrontation with students. For their benefit, and for the sake of everyone else in the class, we as teachers have to get over our reticence in this kind of situation and be the leaders our students need and expect us to be. And that means having uncomfortable conversations.

Sarah Davies talked to me about the value of getting past your fear and initiating this kind of talk:

I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like to have personal conversations and will avoid conflict, but I definitely see how if we end up with a difficult personality it’s way better to have that difficult conversation early. It’s easier for me to have that difficult conversation having been on the side of the dedicated student who would really do anything to make this work.

Anne Marie Forrester told me a story about getting past her own fears of confrontation in dealing with the problems caused by a student and stressed the importance of having the conversation with kindness and respect:

The trickiest part—and I think this is true whether it’s the coven or workplace or personal relationships of any kind—is that you have to confront people and be very up front and honest with them, which is really hard. But at the same time you have to do it in a respectful way that’s kind, if possible. We’ve had to do this with a couple of people now. It’s important to take the time to talk with them in private, not in front of the whole group. Then we can say things like, “We’ve noticed that you’re not always respectful to the other members of this group, and we would like you to work on that” or “We work by consensus here, and some of your behavior has caused hard feelings among some of our other members. We can’t tell you who or why, and we’re deeply sorry about that, but you have to go.” Not being afraid of confrontation has been a really difficult lesson for me to learn; however, it is the most honest and respectful way to be, and it saves a lot of unnecessary pain in the end.

I’ve personally found the compassionate approach to be very helpful. Sometimes when you point out a person’s disruptive behavior to them, they appreciate being talked to because they didn’t even know they were behaving that way. Sometimes your compassionate and calm handling of the issue defuses the behavior immediately; the disruptive person picks up on your calm energy and responds in kind. And sometimes the compassionate approach encourages them to behave when they see the contrast between their behavior and the way you are treating them when you are dealing with it. If you want them to change their behavior and not leave the class or group, the compassionate approach—rather than an angry or accusatory one—allows them some dignity and you the opportunity to coach them on what better or more acceptable behavior might be.

Being compassionate doesn’t mean being a doormat, being passive-aggressive, or letting the student manipulate you if the problem you’re having is with a student. It means standing your ground and handling the situation with respect and empathy, and getting tough if the compassion doesn’t work. If you are teaching online, you can still use the compassionate approach via chat, email, phone, or however you communicate with students. Just remember to word what you’re saying carefully, and keep in mind that email can be forwarded, so don’t write anything in frustration that you don’t want the world to see.

It’s important to keep the upper hand. By this I don’t mean “beat students into submission,” no matter how tempting that might be at times. I mean keeping things flowing smoothly and not letting students take control of your class. Melanie Henry talked to me about this:

One always has to keep the upper hand, but keeping the upper hand doesn’t have to be just the main show of force.… It’s energy perceptions and keeping a good idea on where your leverage point is; like the philosopher said, “I know I can move anything if I know where to stand.”

Good Pagan teachers use all of the tools at their disposal—both the “regular” senses like sight and hearing and energetic or psychic senses—to make sure they have their thumb on the pulse of what’s going on in their class.

Some Specific Challenges with Students

Students Who Don’t Get Along

Nearly everyone has been in a class where another student drove them nuts—the person who won’t shut up, the person who is rude, the person who demands the teacher’s attention all the time, the person who won’t do his or her share of a group project—and most people deal with it by gritting their teeth and bearing it or talking to the person they’re having a problem with in order to try to solve the problem and get the most out of the course without detracting from anyone else’s learning. Sometimes, however, one student’s irritation or anger at another affects the whole class.

To me, the commonly used Wiccan phrase “perfect love and perfect trust” doesn’t mean that you completely love and trust each person you’re going to be in a circle or room with; it means that you have the perfect—or right—amount of “love” (or regard for) and trust for them so that you can put aside any beefs you might have with them at least long enough to do your circle or class, and keep your feelings from tempering the experience for yourself and others. Stating that perfect love and perfect trust (or just plain respect and good manners) are expected in your class is a very good ground rule. If students can’t seem to get along anyway, you have several options:

  • Encourage students to talk to each other if they have problems. Often they’ll mediate their own problems.
  • If they can’t solve the problem themselves, take one or both parties aside privately—together or separately—and have one of those “difficult conversations” I mentioned earlier.
  • If the conflict appears to be a no-fault situation, you can ask the people involved to go into a separate room and come back when they’ve sorted it out, with or without you mediating.

If you believe one of the parties in the dispute is being bullied by the other—adults can bully as well or better than kids can—try these steps:

  • Take the two people aside separately. The person being bullied will be much more comfortable and up front about what’s going on if the person who is bullying is not there.
  • Reassure the person being bullied that you’ve heard what he or she has to say about the situation, you understand, and you are taking action.
  • When you talk to the person who is bullying, try to find out why he or she is doing it.
  • If there’s a reason—he or she is upset or nervous or just doesn’t have great social skills—you might be able to coach him or her through it.
  • If there’s no reason, or if the person is just a jerk, don’t hesitate to boot him or her.

Keeping an unrepentant bully around is one of the best ways I can think of to sabotage your class by destroying morale, peace, and trust. Your students come to you for spiritual teaching, not to be traumatized. You’re not their parent, and you’re not running a nanny state, but it’s your responsibility as a teacher to try to create an environment that is safe and conducive to learning. Trust me: if you notice there’s something going on, students in your class who are not involved in the conflict have noticed it too—and probably before you did. The teacher is often the last to know.

Students Who Get Along Too Well

Naturally, you want your students to bond. These bonds make communication, energy flow, ritual, and magic smoother. But sometimes problems can arise when two or three students like each other so much that they form a group within your group, something like a high-school clique. If it’s just a mini mutual-admiration society and the members are still doing their work and not disrupting the class, it’s not necessarily a big deal. But sometimes cliques become a bit like black holes in the middle of your group: they focus inward rather than on whatever the greater group is doing and they pull people off track, first within the clique and then other members of the class.

There’s also the issue of exclusion. If there’s a tight-knit group within your group, the students who aren’t members of the clique might feel alienated and left out. Of course there’s no rule that says everyone has to like or be friends with everyone else. But when students come together to learn, things work better if each person can treat the others in the group relatively equally, at least during class.

The other potential danger of cliques is when and if they break up, the fallout can affect the whole group. Friendships that happen quickly and deeply sometimes blow up equally spectacularly. Two BFFs who suddenly decide they can’t stand each other can disrupt and divide your group.

Here are some ways to reduce the impact of a clique or discourage cliques from forming:

  • Encourage students to socialize as a whole group outside of class.
  • Plan in-class activities that require working with a partner or small group, and keep mixing up the participants so everyone gets a chance to work with everyone else.
  • Online you can encourage students to chat or email with everyone in class.

And of course if a clique does form and it’s starting to disrupt your class, you can pull the members aside and have yet another one of those difficult conversations. Stress that you’re glad they’re friends, but that their relationship is a distraction to others, and ask them to leave it at the door when they come to class.

Students Who Don’t Do Their Work

Having students who don’t do their work regularly—whether it be assignments you give, at-home spiritual practice, or work on their personal issues—can be a big problem. At first it seems like they’re only hurting themselves when they don’t do their work, but if you have a couple of people who constantly refuse to do their work, it can reduce the morale of the overall group and hold everyone else back. Students not doing their work can really suck the energy out of a class, and it can also diminish the respect the other students have for you as their teacher, especially if you let the ones not doing their work get away with it.

If it’s just one or two students who are not doing their work, take them aside privately and ask them why. It might be that they don’t understand the assignments, or there could be other things going on that are preventing them from finding time. It might also be that they aren’t getting what they wanted to out of the class or they are having a problem with your communication or teaching style. If that is the case, ask them what you could change that might help them get more out of the class, and incorporate their suggestions if you can. Adult learners often have a good sense of what they need in order to learn; it’s possible that you can learn a teaching trick or two from them in these situations.

Some other options are:

  • Be sure to give students reasonable assignments and enough time to do them. Adult learners have a lot of other things going on in their lives.
  • Offer help. Sometimes students—even adult students—don’t do their work because they’re confused or overwhelmed and afraid to ask for assistance.
  • Make it clear to students that you’re not assigning busywork; the assignments you give are designed to help them on their spiritual path.

It’s a good idea to make it clear up front that you expect people to do their work, and if they don’t, that might hold the whole class back. It’s especially frustrating if you give them an assignment and plan to have a group discussion about the work in the next class and some people don’t do it. Sometimes just saying that out loud will encourage people to follow through, if only because they don’t want to incur the wrath of everyone else in the class.

A few times when I’ve had students show up without doing their work I have asked them to do it orally in front of the class. Being put on the spot generally deters most people from not doing their work again, although some people actually seem to enjoy making an impromptu presentation more than doing whatever the assignment was.

Another option is not to base your lesson on students having done their previous assignment. The problem with this is that students generally learn more from doing follow-up or going over assignments in class with their peers. Just collecting the work from those who have done it and giving the eyebrow to those who haven’t doesn’t give students the chance for peer feedback and interaction.

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.

Some other teachers told us they believed we’d made the right decision, and some told us we were cowards. I suspect the truth—if there is a truth here—is somewhere in between. But I think the important thing was that we recognized that we were in over our heads, and we did what we thought was best to protect our student and our group. The good news is that by releasing that student from our group, we freed her up to find a group with a structure that was a better fit for her situation and needs. She was initiated into a local coven and is thriving as a member of that community.

If you have had a bad experience with someone who has drug and alcohol issues or a mental illness, try not to make the assumption that everyone who has the same condition as the person you had a problem with will also cause problems. For example, if you had trouble with a bipolar student, it doesn’t mean that all bipolar students will act exactly the same way or be problematic. When you are thinking of taking on students, consider each one individually as a whole person with unique strengths and challenges, and try to look at the big picture when you make your decision. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t listen to your instinct or past experience when considering working with someone with addiction or mental health issues, but it’s important to know that each person is much more than his or her problems and consider them on their individual merits.

As with dealing with students in crisis, it’s good to have a list of places where you can refer students with addiction or mental health problems for help. It’s also good to know what you can handle and what you can’t. I know from long, hard, heartbreaking experience that there is absolutely nothing I personally can do to help addicts who are still using and refuse to stop except kick them out of my class and hope that this is one of the many acts of “tough love” that eventually inspires them to go to rehab.

If you take on a student with known addiction or mental health issues because their behavior is normal, and that behavior changes after they’re in your class, talk to them as soon as you can after the behavior change. If the person has a mental illness and has stopped medication, make their participation in your group contingent upon them seeing their doctor and resuming medication right away or, if the medication was problematic, starting another doctor-prescribed treatment regimen. Whether it’s a mental health or addiction issue, do not allow the behavior to get out of hand. Be firm with the person and make it absolutely clear that they must follow your group’s accepted rules for respectful, consistent, reliable behavior. If they can’t or won’t keep their behavior within acceptable limits, ask them to leave. It might feel very cold to boot them—after all, nobody signs up to become an alcoholic, and mental illnesses are not the patient’s fault—but that doesn’t mean you can save them or that it is your job to try.

And it’s likely your other students didn’t sign on for that either. You need to think of them and their well-being too. Melanie Henry told me, “The people I’ve learned the most from have often been the most disturbing.” She is absolutely right, but don’t let that learning come at the expense of your other students. Remember, too, that if you really want or need to help someone with mental health or addiction issues, you can always find ways to do it outside of class and the student-teacher relationship.

Trolls

The sad truth is that the Pagan community has a certain appeal for people who thrive on conflict. Our community tends to encourage everyone to explore his or her own personal spiritual path and ethics. We tend to be tolerant and accepting of personal differences. And although we have some large umbrella groups, we tend to avoid centralized authority. These are wonderful traits for the most part, but they also make the Pagan community very appealing to people who like to cause problems for the sake of causing problems and getting attention.

People in the Pagan community who wreak havoc in groups—setting fire to the city just to see it burn—are often called trolls. This term is particularly used online for people who enter a discussion group or online community and purposefully derail the discussion, start fights, or insult and flame others. But it also applies to people who do the same things in person. Trolls are often very likable at first—charming, even, with the gift of glamour (meaning the ability to make themselves seem to be something other—and more appealing—than what they are). They are also often excellent liars. Frequently they have a personal set of “ethics” that either changes to suit their purposes or otherwise doesn’t mesh with others’. They can be very good at playing the victim in a situation and making you believe it, even if they actually instigated the problem, and nothing is ever “their fault.” They’re also often very good at making you question your choices as a teacher and a leader.

Several of my interviewees told me stories about trolls. Melanie Henry told me about a student she worked with who tried to “glamour” her whole coven:

She was just a huge liar. I mean, she would say three opposing things about the same thing, like, for example, why was she wearing the wedding ring—there were three different stories within about six weeks. It wasn’t the thing you would catch on the first instance. The story would be internally consistent during the interview, it just fell apart pretty quickly afterward.

Sylva Markson also told me a story about a woman who created a subculture of secrecy within their coven, and whose lying and manipulation blew up the group from the inside:

As all of this started coming out, we realized that we had all been part of it unwittingly. She would say things to me—“Well, don’t tell anybody, but…” and then she’d tell me something that she had heard or something that she believed or whatever, and then she’d do the same to other people. When we started talking to each other, we realized that there was a whole kind of underground culture of silence going on inside the group—that we all had little bits of secrets of things from her that none of us knew that everybody else had different versions of.

She was kicked out of the group.… She brought it to the larger community and besmirched our trainers in a lot of ways that were completely wrong and unfair and outright lies. And some of the ways in which she was not completely wrong she at least grossly mischaracterized or exaggerated the reality, and basically hurt everybody in the group horribly. And it was all politics.

I don’t think most people would have the kind of agendas that this person had. But again, I’m left feeling like I’m questioning my own judgment because I adored her. I did not see this coming at all. Nobody saw it coming.

Trolls are in a whole different league from regular disruptive and needy people or people who don’t get along. Most disruptive people can change their behavior when they find out it’s a problem, or at least tone it down. Trolls don’t have any incentive to change, because their behavior gets them the attention they crave. Their goal is chaos. If you ask them to stop their behavior, they might take it underground, say you’ve misunderstood them, or accuse you of being a bully—but they will not stop. Like the woman in Sylva Markson’s story, they will turn friends against each other, bring your dirty laundry out into the greater community, and make you question yourself as a teacher, a Pagan, and a human being. The only way to truly deal with a troll is not to feed it—meaning stop giving the person your attention, boot him or her out of your group or class, and cease all contact. It’s possible that the troll will badmouth you in the community, but dealing with that is better than having him or her destroy your group from within. The “difficult conversation” doesn’t work at all with trolls. Don’t waste your breath. Save your compassion for someone who will benefit from it.

So how do you tell if someone is a troll or just behaving badly because they’re having a bad day or in a crisis of some kind? This is tricky, because trolls are masters of what I like to call the “theater of one.” They always show you, the teacher, exactly what they want you to see, and nothing else. If they were actors on a stage, you, as the teacher, would always be sitting front and center. If you moved, the trolls would move to maintain the position directly in front of you. They will avoid letting you see them from the side or behind the scenes at all costs. They will always put forward their most charismatic face. The good news and bad news about that is if trolls have you in the theater of one, it’s possible that maintaining that is taking up enough of their attention that others might be able to see “backstage.” If you think that someone might be playing you or is simply too good to be true, you can ask a friend or another teacher to observe the person as you teach. It’s possible the friend will be able to see a side of the maybe-troll that you can’t, because you’re busy teaching.

Melanie Henry told me she likes to have another person around to help her see through the glamour:

I am really bad at seeing through glamour, so I try to have someone who’s good at seeing through that stuff. One thing you learn as a teacher is that it’s good if you can identify things you’re bad at, not because you’ll suddenly become good at them, but if you can find someone else who’s good at that who can watch your back, that’s a really good thing.

I generally don’t ask students to be that person watching my back, because it’s unfair to ask them to “spy” on one of their peers. But sometimes other students are the best eyes and ears you can have, and if it’s a matter of putting a student in what could be an uncomfortable position versus having a troll destroy your group, you might decide it’s worth it to ask the student to be uncomfortable. It does put an unfair burden on the student, however. As with most interpersonal things, this is a judgment call, and no two situations are the same.

As Melanie Henry points out, it’s important to listen to students, too, if they approach you with concerns about another student or about anything class-related, for that matter:

One of the key things there is, too, is if somebody says that there is a problem, listen…. People are doing a great favor if they disagree with you and tell you why. They could be wrong, but there’s generally something going on.

They might be wrong about the other student or they could be seeing trollish behavior that you are missing. I once booted someone from one of my classes for a reason other than being a troll, and afterward several of the remaining students came up to me privately and told me that the person had been doing things behind my back that could have done a lot of damage to my class if left unchecked. I had no idea, I felt like an idiot, and I wished that my students had told me earlier, but I understood why they didn’t. The person in question had them in thrall too, to a certain extent, but they also just weren’t sure they should speak up. I could tell in retrospect that the student we booted was very good at the “theater of one” routine.

If the person appears to be extremely self-centered—to the point of having a very different reality from “consensual” reality—or not to care about the feelings of others, keep an eye on him or her. Part of the reason trolls succeed in causing so much trouble is that they just don’t care who they hurt in the process. They will say and do just about anything to perpetuate their version of reality and make themselves appear to be the victim if you start to get wise to them. Another telltale sign is people who give different accounts of the same event to different people. You won’t necessarily know this is happening unless your students or someone else tells you, but keep your ears open. Sometimes the troll will tell the same story differently in your presence, or at least within earshot.

One of the best ways to deal with trolls in your class is to not allow them to get there in the first place. The screening techniques in Chapter 3 aren’t foolproof, but they can help you weed out some potential trolls beforehand. There is absolutely nothing wrong with asking potential students for references. If they’ve burned a previous teacher, be careful. It’s possible the teacher was at fault—and there are certainly cases where a student leaves a group because he or she doesn’t get along with the teacher and then gets along fine in a new group—but it’s also possible the person is a troll.

Some Teacher-Specific Challenges

Students are only human, but so are teachers, and teachers can have as many problems as their students do. The bad news is that the pitfalls in the section below can happen to nearly any teacher. The good news is that using the ethics and boundaries section of Chapter 8 and the self-care tips in Chapter 11 can help you avoid some of them and recover from others.

Hubris and Believing Your Own Hype

As a teacher, it can be easy to slip from a more modest place—where you take pride in knowing that you’re facilitating others’ learning—into an arrogant hubris, where you erroneously think that the good stuff happening for your students is all about you. It is particularly easy to do this if you have been teaching for a while with success, or you’ve begun to make a name for yourself, or if you haven’t found anyone who knows more than you do (yet).

Oberon Zell-Ravenheart told me a story about hubris:

In my earliest days of teaching Paganism and the Craft (in my late twenties), I was stunningly arrogant in my assumption of how much more I knew than anyone else. I recall a particularly embarrassing (in retrospect) incident when I had really only been studying the Craft myself for a year or so. Since this put me way ahead of everyone else in the Nest, they looked to me to teach them and expected me to know all the answers. One time they brought in a young guy who wanted to meet me, having heard of me as a great teacher. He said he was a Witch, so I started asking him questions. But I was so ignorant that I didn’t know anything about his tradition (Alexandrian, as it turned out), and I cut him down mercilessly when his answers differed from what I had been taught and learned through my own studies—which was heavily based on Crowley and Leland. Later on, when I learned about Gardnerian and Alexandrian Trads, and realized he had been perfectly right, I felt like a total fool. It was a very humbling experience, and I’ve always wished I could have tracked that guy down and apologized profusely to him. Many years later I even wrote a cautionary editorial about this in Green Egg.

Falling into hubris can happen to beginning teachers too, who mistake the powerful feeling that teaching can give you for actual power or who think that because they’ve got a few students, suddenly they are movers and shakers in the community. Ellen Evert Hopman told me a story about a young teacher who thought she was a bigger fish than she really was:

I was at Pagan Pride Day a couple of years ago, and they said they were going to have a panel of elders to speak to the audience. I was invited to be on the panel of elders. I thought, “Well, that’s cool.” So I’m up there with a bunch of other people—we’re all in our fifties, sixties, seventies, right? And then there is this seventeen-year-old sitting there with us. And I just very innocently turned to her, because I had no idea why she was there, and in a friendly way said, “What are you doing here?” Because I didn’t know why she was there—to wait on us? Bring us water? What, actually? And I couldn’t figure it out. She replied, “Oh, I’m an elder.” And I said, “Oh, really?” and then she immediately ran to find her mother. She was in tears and all upset because I had challenged her.

And the mother came back and was furious. She said that I had destroyed her daughter’s self-confidence. How dare I question her daughter? And I was just flabbergasted, because everybody else on the panel was an elder. To get to the status of elder you have to go through hell, literally—I mean years and years and years of teaching and dealing with human frailties and conflicts and initiating people and marrying people and having people die. And, I mean, to really be an elder, it’s a lifetime of work and experience—for no pay, of course, because Pagans won’t pay for this kind of thing—you dedicate yourself and with very little reward. We have no pensions, we have no health insurance, no retirement, nothing.

And then to have a little seventeen-year-old say that she’s an elder because she had founded a coven and she had kids under her—I guess fifteen-, sixteen-year-olds—so we were supposed to respect her. It’s difficult. We were supposed to respect her on equal footing with people who are in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. I found that a little difficult, the fact that she had to go running for her mother. I wanted to say—but I didn’t—I wanted to say, “Well, look: if you have to go running for your mother, that shows you’re not quite there yet.”

Obviously, hubris turns people off, since nobody likes self-important people who bask in their own awesomeness. But worse yet, hubris is almost always built on a false conception of reality—where you think you’re more important than you really are—and living in that false place cuts you off from your center and whatever grounds you, and also from the real world and what’s going on around you. Teachers who are cut off are ineffective at best.

People wrapped up in their own hubris are distracted by the needs of their own egos and therefore incapable of living up to their hype. We’ve all seen it: actors, directors, musicians, authors, and athletes who crank out some really great work and are showered with accolades. Then they buy into the image of their own greatness created by the praise and are unable to produce any new work that’s as good, because they lose touch with whatever made their work great in the first place.

Hubris can also lead teachers to pull power plays on their students, boss them around, belittle them, and engage in all sorts of other behaviors that are more about controlling students and/or feeding the teacher’s ego than about teaching and helping others.

It’s good to have some people around who are willing to be straight with you and tell you if they think you’re getting too arrogant. Keeping close to your core and revisiting why you teach and what you want for—not from—your students are good hubris antidotes too.

Guru Syndrome: The Cult of You

Be they Pagan, Wiccan, Christian, or any other path, spiritual communities seem predisposed to creating gurus. I am not referring to gurus in the Hindu sense or in the general sense of “teacher.” I am using the term to mean teachers who are perceived as having great spiritual wisdom and knowledge—more than the average teacher—and who acquire followers, disciples, or devotees. A cult of personality builds up the teacher, and the teacher becomes symbolic of and then synonymous with the spiritual teachings followers hope to gain. Followers feel they are dependent on the guru, rather than on their own initiative and intuition, to achieve their spiritual goals.

Sometimes teachers become gurus out of their own hubris, gathering students around them who follow them like ducklings and feed their egos. Sometimes students “create” a guru out of a teacher by putting the teacher on a pedestal and deciding that the teacher will somehow “save” them or give them all the answers they need. And sometimes teachers buy into the inflated, unrealistic image students have created of them, and knowingly or inadvertently set themselves up as gurus with students’ enthusiastic help.

It is very important as Pagan teachers that we not allow our egos to make us gurus or allow students to make gurus of us. We are here to help facilitate students’ spiritual growth, and although we might guide them, it’s crucial that they own the process themselves, or they will fail. Paganism and Wicca are, among other things, ways to claim one’s own power. For students, claiming and owning their own power is their means to walking their path and achieving their spiritual goals. When students make you their guru and become your acolytes, they are essentially handing you their power, thus abdicating their responsibility for their own learning and spiritual growth. This can feel great to unwitting teachers—students are putting their faith and trust solely in your hands, and you feel important and needed. But for their sake and yours, it’s crucial that you hand students’ power right back to them and resist the urge to take on responsibility that should be theirs.

Teachers should be on the lookout for students who might be developing an unrealistic image of them. Melanie Henry commented:

I don’t like people looking at me all starry-eyed and getting “teacher crushes” on me. That drives me a little crazy. I can be flattered, but if your eyes are glazed over like that, you’re not seeing me.

Another thing to watch out for, especially if you’re working with one group of students over a longer period of time, is whether your students are beginning to exhibit cultish behaviors or overdependence on you as the teacher. Magical groups can get very insular, to the point where members spend an inordinate amount of time together and allow other relationships to suffer or fall away. It’s important that your behavior as a teacher doesn’t encourage students to do this, not only because they’re building their own mini cult, but also because they’re building it around you.

To avoid the guru syndrome, you also want to nip other codependent behaviors in the bud. If students begin to rely too much on your opinion or help rather than their own ideas and initiative, find ways to put the responsibility for decision making and action back on them. A friend recently told me a story about a teacher of alternative healing whom she greatly admired but hadn’t seen for a long time. When she did see the teacher again and observed her with clients, my friend noticed that several of the teacher’s clients had become dependent on the teacher, coming to her weekly for up to a decade to make sure they were energetically “in tune with their higher selves.” The teacher was so good at doing this for her clients that they resisted doing it for themselves, even though they could. And the teacher was unwittingly perpetuating this dependency by not cutting the cord and telling students they needed to do this work for themselves.

Students seem to be especially vulnerable to picking up codependent behaviors or putting unrealistic expectations on teachers who have helped them have life-changing realizations or discoveries. When students have these epiphanies, they are sometimes overcome with what I call the “fervor of the newly converted”—the belief that this discovery they’ve just made is so awesomely powerful that it will work for everyone, and that they must immediately go out and evangelize about this incredible, life-changing realization which, in addition to solving everyone’s most pesky problems, will put an end to famine, halt global warming, save the whales and the polar bears, and make all the peoples of the earth embrace each other in peace and harmony. Students in the midst of the fervor of the newly converted might transfer their enthusiasm for their epiphany to the teacher who helped them have it. Remind students who have these revelations in your class that it was they themselves who climbed Mount Everest and made the discovery. You simply provided them with supplies, and maybe a Sherpa.

Another way to pop the guru bubble is to be very open with students. Don’t hold back and keep things a mystery. The more mysterious you are, the less “human” you are, and the more students might think that you have some sort of mystical, magical power or arcane knowledge.

Exhaustion and Burnout

Exhaustion and burnout are often insidious. In most cases, they don’t overcome you overnight. Becoming exhausted and/or burned out is a gradual process that sneaks up behind teachers slowly. Often they don’t realize how fried they are until they are whacked over the head by some cosmic clue-by-four because they were so tired they weren’t paying attention. The clue-by-four can be a smallish-but-embarrassing thing, such as a friend or another teacher telling them they’re slipping, or it can be much bigger, such as a health crisis brought on by stress.

It can be very difficult to recover from exhaustion and burnout if you let it go too far. I can tell you this from hard personal experience. For the past three years, I have been working on a huge project at my day job that has consumed an enormous amount of my time, including evenings and weekends. On top of that, I’ve battled a set of serious health problems. My health is improving and my deadline will be met soon, but I know it will probably take me months to get all my energy back again. During this time, it has been very difficult to find the energy or even desire to teach. My class has met much less frequently, and my students haven’t gotten the attention they need. And my teaching has really suffered.

Exhausted and burned-out teachers are not inspiring or effective. It is very difficult to motivate or facilitate students’ learning when you are exhausted, and it’s also hard to drum up the enthusiasm for your subject that you need to teach it well. Students can tell when you’re exhausted or burned out, and they’re less likely to be engaged and get what they need to out of your class if it appears that you yourself have lost interest.

There are several things teachers do—often with the best of intentions—that can accelerate their own exhaustion and burnout. The most obvious is simply taking on more than they can handle time-wise or energy-wise.

Taking responsibility for students’ learning or actions will also drain your time and energy resources very quickly. It’s important that they hold the reins of their own spiritual education and journey. If you try to do it, you are robbing them of owning it themselves, and you’re also taking on a burden you can’t possibly carry.

Trying to control students’ learning—the pace at which they learn and internalize the information, how they learn, or whether they learn it at all—can also lead to exhaustion and burnout. Although you will help students gain knowledge gradually by waiting until they have some understanding of a concept before building on it with new, more challenging material (this is called “scaffolding” in teacher-speak), you can’t control how quickly students grasp concepts, or at what level. If you are expecting them to come to conclusions at a certain time—or, worse, in the same way as you did or as your other students do—you will be disappointed. Don’t wear yourself out trying to make this happen. Most students will “get it” at their own pace and in their own time.

Martyring yourself—throwing everything you have into teaching, getting over-involved in students’ personal lives, and/or sacrificing your own needs for those of your students—is a one-way ticket to exhaustion and burnout, as is expecting students to reciprocate to your martyrdom with gratitude and thanks. Many students will appreciate what you do for them, but don’t expect them all to say so, and don’t expect to counteract your exhaustion with positive feedback from students that might or might not ever come. The sad truth is that although there are exceptions, our society in general takes teachers for granted. Don’t depend on student kudos to revitalize you. And if you’re sacrificing enough for your students that you could be called a martyr, you’re giving up much more than students could ever reciprocate, even if they were inclined to do so. Some of the symptoms of exhaustion and burnout are:

It’s best if you can determine that you’re heading for exhaustion and burnout before you start having these symptoms, but most teachers don’t realize they’re in trouble until some of these begin to manifest. Don’t knock yourself if you don’t notice you’re exhausted or burning out until you’re in the thick of it, but do try to be aware and catch it before it gets to the point where you either can’t reverse it or it affects your physical or mental health. Many of the symptoms are reversible—although it isn’t easy if you’ve gone a long way down the path. Some practical steps you can take if you think you are beginning to burn out are:

There are also things you can do to rejuvenate and try to bring the spark back. The techniques I mention in Chapter 11 help to fight off and recover from exhaustion and burnout.

Facing Your Own Demons

Earlier in this chapter, I talked about handling crises and situations when people’s personal issues surface as a result of learning. But what about your own baggage?

Becoming a teacher is an initiation of sorts. Initiation, by its very nature, is not comfortable. The point of initiation is to induce change in your life and transition you from one state, or point, to another. Teaching other people can do that too. Once you have stepped into the teaching arena, you will never be the same as you were before you did it, even if you never teach again. It will be a catalyst to your own learning and spiritual growth, but it might also cast a harsh light on your own baggage or issues you didn’t know or remember you had.

And if that wasn’t enough, students’ crises or emotional responses to their experiences can trigger your own issues too. In fact, it’s commonly said in my tradition that when you initiate someone, you go through initiation yourself all over again. It’s true in the sense that you are participating in the ceremony again—albeit as the initiator, not the person being initiated—but also in that you are affected by it and change as a result. Melanie Henry talked to me about teaching making you face your own demons:

If you’re squeamish on whatever level, believe me that the teaching will confront you with your own shit. So you’d better have some idea of that, and know how to face it. Especially it will make you face your shadow. Your students will for sure show you that you’ve got to be willing to deal with the scary, icky stuff that’s part of the human condition.... If you set yourself up as a teacher of Witchcraft, you will not be able to avoid that, because you’re a doorway—a doorway of initiation. People coming to you for Witchcraft are going to be people who do have at least a nod to dark stuff. You have to be willing to look into the darkness. You have to be able to have some of your strength come from that…. I think if you embrace Witchcraft as a spirituality, you have to make your peace with darkness—I don’t mean darkness in terms of evil, I mean in terms of night.

Making peace with your darkness can mean many things, among them knowing your own weaknesses and less-healthy tendencies and devising ways to handle them. For example, if you are prone to taking things personally, it’s good to know that and have a way to talk yourself through it if such a situation arises. It can also mean accepting the fact that without dark there is no light, and vice versa, and that we carry both within us at all times. As Pagans we don’t have to accept a good-versus-evil mentality. Embracing and understanding your darkness can mean accepting that there are many shades of grey, both in you and in your students, which is easier said than done but important nonetheless.

Having your personal issues come up while you are teaching can be subtle and (relatively) easy to deal with, such as having doubts about your teaching or feeling insecure. These types of problems are among the most common, and often you can talk yourself out of them or have a friend help you do so. Issues of identity that make you do a lot of soul-searching can also come up. You might question why you’re on your own path, whether you think you’re “good” enough to teach, and your purpose in life. These questions aren’t comfortable, but they’re important questions to explore, no matter how they come up. In this way, teaching can be a catalyst for healthy stuff to surface in addition to all that emotional baggage.

It’s important to have your own support system in place before or in case something happens. In many cases, it’s not appropriate to rely on your students for emotional support, even if something happens while you are in class. Exceptions might be if you are co-teaching or if you have close friends in the group. Have a short list of friends, mentors, or family members in mind whom you can call if you need help or to talk. And, if you are going through a period of depression or anxiety or have unresolved issues from relationships or family history that might be triggered by students’ problems, it’s not a bad idea to “get your house in order” by doing some work with a therapist or counselor. You will be far better at helping students handle their problems if you are dealing with your own in a healthy way.

Try as much as possible to prevent whatever is happening to you from affecting the quality or atmosphere of your class, and keep any freaking out to a minimum while you’re in students’ presence. If you need to leave the room or cancel a class, do so, give them a reason, and reschedule later if possible. You don’t have to be specific about the reason. “I’m very sorry, but I need to deal with a personal crisis/issue” is sufficient. It’s crucial that your students know you are not perfect and that you have feelings, but they don’t need to see you have an emotional meltdown. If you do have one in front of them, apologize and take responsibility for it.

It’s also important not to blame students for what’s happening or associate them with it if something they did or experienced in your class contributed to your issue surfacing. It’s not their fault. Sometimes these things just happen. On the positive side, with the right support you can get a great deal of learning and healing out of these incidents, and you’ll be more understanding and have more experience to help others handle problems that arise for them.

The self-care tips in Chapter 11 can help you handle this sort of problem too.

[contents]

I had a terrible education. I went to a school for emotionally disturbed teachers.

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Woody Allen