Who’s the Protagonist?

If you’re reading a story or telling a story, that’s usually obvious, isn’t it? But if you’re living a story, it gets a little bit tricky. In your personal story, the Story of your own life, the protagonist is (presumably) you … but what about your professional story? What about your teaching and learning Story?

“Mosaic depicting theatrical masks of Tragedy and Comedy, 2nd century AD, from Rome Thermae Decianae (?), Palazzo Nuovo, Capitoline Museums” by Following Hadrian is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

I tend to tell story fragments in these posts, little bits of the Story that D, Q, M, E, and their alphabetically-disguised counterparts have told me. And you may have noticed that I’m not the protagonist when I tell those coaching and teaching stories, those stories of transformation. Sometimes D, Q, M, or E is the protagonist. Sometimes the real protagonist is the coaching process. When I tell stories of my Latin learners, the protagonist is sometimes the learner, sometimes the subject matter.

But a lot of teachers, especially the teachers who are Stuck and Frustrated, are telling a different kind of Story. A lot of teachers are telling a teaching and learning story where they’re either the Protagonist, if things go well, or the Persecuted Victim, if things go badly.

I get it! That’s what it feels like in your Personal Story! And your Personal Story is important.

But your Personal Story isn’t your Teaching Story. Your Personal Identity isn’t your Professional Identity. Your Teaching Story, your Professional Story, isn’t all about you the way your Personal Story is. Your Professional Story is about the people you serve professionally and the results you help them achieve. Your Professional Identity is about who and how you are being as you serve them and help them achieve those results.

When our Personal Story and Professional Story get fused, we suffer! When our Personal Identity and Professional Identity get fused, we suffer! And when our specific professional role gets fused with our Personal and Professional Identities, the suffering is compounded.

If you’ve been feeling stuck and frustrated, trapped in a Story where there’s always too much work and not enough time, take a moment. Take a quiet moment. See if you’re trying to be the Protagonist in a Story that isn’t fully yours. And if you have been, there’s great news. You can stop. You can change. You can re-craft your story and shift your role and get those identities and role definitions unfused.

We can work on that together if you want.

Guarding Your Identity

In yesterday’s post, we talked about how teaching tends to be an identity-level job f – not just a role that I have (the way so many non-teaching jobs are) but who I am professionally. And in many cases, especially the frustrated teachers I’m serving these days, the professional identity becomes a larger and larger part of the personal identity. Sometimes our specific role (“I’m the Latin teacher at XYZ School” or “I’m the fifth grade teacher in Room 209 at ABC School”) gets fused with our professional identity and with our personal identity. I call it identity-role fusion, and it’s really common and it’s nobody’s fault and it’s the root of all kinds of problems. It makes it really hard to guard your identity and protect it from the Stuff that’s going on around you … stuff that probably isn’t even about you. But when you have identity-role fusion, almost everything feels like it is about you. It feels like it’s all about you … and not in a good way!

“All About Me” by cardinalskate is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sometimes life happens and there’s a change in your role or the context of the role … and sometimes it really isn’t personal. “We’re moving you from Room 209 to Room 212 next year,” That Administrator says, or “Enrollment is down, and we need you to teach a section of World History.” That’s never fun to hear! But when you have identity-role fusion, it can be totally overwhelming. “But I’m the teacher in Room 209, not 212! Room 209 is part of who I am!” says your fused identity. And it feels like you’re under identity-level attack. No matter what That Administrator’s actual intentions were, it feels like a deeply personal attack.

“I’m almost ready to retire,” said my friend W, almost 30 years ago, “but not quite. I think I’ll do one more year, maybe two.” In a quiet moment, she added this: “I need to figure out who I’m going to be when I retire.” W took things very personally – things that students and parents and colleagues and administrators said and did, even when they weren’t directed personally at W at all. That’s what happens when you find yourself in role-identity fusion. Even retirement, which W was genuinely looking forward to, felt like a personal attack sometimes.

But it doesn’t have to be that way! W’s friend M – but let’s call her Ms N – never suffered from role-identity fusion. And Ms N taught me an way to have space and grace (as she would put it) between your professional identity and your role.

She had built a professional persona, the “Ms N” version of herself. “Ms N” was the teacher version of M that allowed her to do what people in role-jobs do naturally: she could put on the teaching role when she arrived at work and take it off at the end of the day. “Ms N” wasn’t different from the M she was to her family and friends, but “Ms N” was a distinct version of her. “Ms N” was the secret behind her thriving for the twenty eight (“and a half”) years she taught, even when her teaching role and her specific context changed. Even when there was personal tragedy. And “Ms N” was the secret behind her ability to walk away when she knew it was time.

“Justin,” she said, “I’m retiring at the end of the month. I looked at that textbook, I thought about taking students through that textbook for three more semesters, and I realized I’m done. I talked to the retirement system people and they told me it would be $50 less a month if I retire now. And I can live with that.”

M was able to put aside her Ms N teaching persona when she knew the time was right. And, years before, M was able to leverage her Ms N teaching persona when her role changed – when That Principal asked her to teach some Spanish along with the English classes, and then, a few years later, when he asked her to teach Spanish exclusively. When That Other Principal moved her from Room ABC to Room DEF to Room XYZ.

Do you want the space and grace and comfort and ease that M had? Then you probably need some space between your professional identity and your specific role. You may need a professional persona, or you may just need to get out of identity-role fusion. We can work on that, or you can do it yourself – you know what’s best for you!

Roles and Identities

There’s a thing about teaching – a thing that teachers know, but don’t necessarily have the words for. For many teachers, teaching isn’t just a job role or “what I do” the way so many jobs are. For many, maybe even most, teaching is a professional identity, “a big part of who I am.” For some, the professional identity becomes the personal identity – “I don’t even know what else I could be. All I ever wanted to do was be a teacher.”

But your role is smaller than your identity, just like these theatrical masks are smaller than the actors who wore them. The Latin word for that mask is persona, and we’ll have more to say about it soon.

“Mosaic depicting theatrical masks of Tragedy and Comedy, 2nd century AD, from Rome Thermae Decianae (?), Palazzo Nuovo, Capitoline Museums” by Following Hadrian is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

What do you do when the world changes and your professional identity is no longer possible? If your job was just a role, you could leave and seek a different role – one that was a better fit for your professional identity – like the ancient actor taking off one mask and putting on a new one. But when professional identity and personal identity are fused together the way they are for so many teachers, that’s a daunting task. It feels like tearing off part of yourself rather than changing a mask. No wonder you’re hesitating! No wonder you feel so Stuck and frustrated, so full of anxiety and maybe even despair! No wonder you’ve been hoping for some kind of shortcut.

Remember U? He came to me last week because he knows he can’t be the teacher he used to want to be anymore. He knows he needs to change roles somehow… but what does that mean? Does he seek a totally different role outside of education, building a whole new professional identity to support it? Does he seek a teaching role in a new context, one that’s more aligned and more congruent with the professional identity he already has? Could he possibly change his existing role and re-find his Missing Spark where he is? U isn’t sure … and U isn’t alone.

Let’s call her X. X has been trying to change her role on her own. She’s had some good results, but she’s exhausted … so exhausted. The changes are good for many of her students, but some of them – the ones that need the change the most – don’t quite seem to get it. And just about every weekend, X finds herself with several hours of extra grading and a pile of extra planning to go along with the changes she made. That’s not sustainable and it’s definitely not the regenerative change she was hoping for. But what’s the next right step? X isn’t sure.

But let’s talk about D. She came to me back in early December with a similar issue. Less than two weeks later, we had found the part of D’s professional identity that had her stuck and frustrated. D’s role as the person who controls the process worked well in Old Normal times, but it’s not what her students need now … and it’s not actually aligned with D’s deep, true professional identity. Two weeks after that, D had a workable plan to change that role and readjust her students’ roles. And today, the first day back from Winter Break, she’s been sharing that plan – and starting to implement it – with the class that had her almost at the point of wanting to quit a month ago.

U and X and the others? You?

I’m here for them when they’re ready. And I’m here for you when you’re ready.

Reclaim or Reground?

M, who wondered why she should be the one to pay, has a name for the Next Right Thing we’ll be working on. It’s called “Reground Your Professional Identity.”

And I wasn’t expecting that. But the more we talked about what she desires, the clearer it was.

M’s Professional Identity is true: she’s a good, experienced, effective teacher. But she hasn’t been feeling the effective part since the pandemic started. “We’re moving so slowly!” she told me. “My Latin 1 students are only on This Chapter of The Book.”

It turns out that M’s students know a lot more and can do a lot more than “only This Chapter.” But M couldn’t see that until we started looking closer. “They can’t do this, and they can’t do that, and they can only do this other thing sometimes, not consistently,” she told me.

“How well do they need to be able to do it at this point?” I asked. She was shocked … and that was important.

When we started looking into M’s personal Story, her “Who I Am as a Learner” Story, we discovered something important. For M as a student, every point in The Textbook had been an opportunity for a Deep Dive into Learning, even (especially!) if her teachers didn’t really talk about a given point. So she developed, as we all do, a narrative of persons as one of the foundations of her professional identity, and in that narrative of persons, it’s her job to take every student on every possible deep dive … and it’s the students’ job to dive as deeply as possible every time. (She also developed a narrative of place and purpose and a narrative of practice; more about those later!)

But M’s students, especially since the pandemic, don’t want to dive that deeply. And they don’t need-need to dive that deeply into everything. Just like young M as a student, they want to choose the areas where they dive deeply and the areas where they don’t.

We already know we’ll be regrounding M’s professional identity horizontally, as Otto Scharmer says, in the reality of the people around her – the reality of her students and their strengths and interests. It’s pretty clear that M’s upward vertical grounding is solid: she has a clear sense of purpose, of What For and Who For as a teacher. What about her downward vertical grounding in the place? That may need some regrounding since the school has changed so much. And we know that her temporal grounding – her connection with past practice and present practice and emerging future practice – needs some work.

Do you need to Reground your Professional Identity? Are you a step or two before that, wanting to know if things are Fixable? Are you just looking for your Next Right Step in complex, chaotic, or even confusing conditions? You know when you’re ready, and you know you can reach me at (865) 226-9380 and we’ll get the process started.

More about Casina, III

salvēte, amīcī et sodālēs! As I continued to reflect on the themes of community and identity we’ve been addressing in this series of posts, I noticed several things. First, of course, there are obvious connections between these themes and the core beliefs of the Tres Columnae Project. Even our commitment to providing for various types of learning stems from a passionate commitment to the very different identities of our participants: Some of you learn best in one way, while others learn best in another; some would like to make and create a lot of Submissions to the Project, while others would prefer to focus on their reading and listening-comprehension skills. Rather than dictate every step of the learning process, we aim to provide you with lots of different material, and we’ll guide you (if you need some guidance) to find the right path for you. At the same time, though, if you do join our community, we ask you to commit to building your Knowledge, Skill, and Understanding of Latin and of the Roman world.

In order to join any community – and perhaps especially a Joyful Learning Community – you, the potential member, have to make a conscious choice to identify with the values and expected behaviors of that community. In our case, of course, those values include Joy, Learning, Community, and Ownership, and expected behaviors include extensive reading, active creation, participation in thoughtful dialogue, and an avoidance of what Dexter Hoyos calls “translation in order to understand.” A lēctor fidēlissimus made an excellent point about the connection between values and behavior in an email to me the other day, which I’m quoting with his permission:

I suspect that it is true of the human being that anything we do, repeatedly over time, both expresses and shapes who we are. Early on, it may express more, and through time, shape more.

So, that language that we use about what we do does express and shape who we are. A teacher who chooses to speak of what “we are doing together” is expressing something and, I believe, radically reshaping the work of education. I find that when I run into a parent in the grocery store or somewhere, and we begin to chat, I usually tell them that I have enjoyed “working with” their son or daughter. I just find it uncomfortable and really not quite true to say “I’ve enjoyed teaching your child.” Some days, some class sessions, it’s not always clear who the teacher is!

We could probably spend at least a week unpacking all the implications of this comment, and relating it to the points about I, they, and we that we’ve been considering this week! For the moment, though, I invite you to read it again and let each phrase and clause sink in.

Speaking of Joy, Learning, Community, and Ownership – and Identity, too, for that matter – check out this amazing video from our faithful friend and collaborator Ann M and her Year 7 students in England. It’s the beginning of their slightly adapted version of the story of Cnaeus and the horse from Lectiō XIV. I’m told that there’s more to come!

Themes of identity and community are also important to the development of the story-line itself. By their decision to seek a cure for Casina’s morbus, Valerius and Caelia have clearly chosen a form of community with their ancilla: they’ve taken the whole familia on a difficult, expensive trip to Rome in an attempt to cure her, and Valerius himself has faced some surprise (and even some ridicule) from friends and acquaintances in the process. He seems to be committed to the spirit as well as the letter of notions like pietās, and of the complicated customs and laws that govern the interactions between dominī and servī in the Roman world – in sharp contrast to his brother-in-law, who has displayed a very different attitude about servī (and ancillae in particular) in stories like this one and this one. In fact, even Caelius’ friend Claudius Pulcher, with whom the familiae are staying in Rome, seems shocked and surprised by Valerius’ pietās, despite his not-entirely-serious exclamation of respect near the end of this story.

As the overall story-line of the Tres Columnae Project continues to unfold, we’ll see some further repercussions of Valerius’ pietās, and we’ll also find out whether young Lucius fulfills the childhood dream he expresses in this story. But that’s for another day! 🙂 Today, let’s continue to explore the sequence of stories about Casina and her morbus novissimus with the story, now available from this link at the Tres Columnae Version Alpha wiki site, in which Valerius is explaining the initial treatment plan to a bewildered, but ultimately delighted Casina:

hodiē māne Casina ē lectō anxia surgit. Valerium quaerit et “mī domine,” inquit, “cūr mē tantō honōre afficis? nōnne ancilla sum tua? cūr igitur mēcum iter Rōmam facis? cūr remedia mihi quaeris? plūrimī enim dominī, cum servī aegrotant, illōs vel pūniunt vel vēndunt.”

Valerius “Casina mea,” respondet, “nēminem oportet servum aegrum pūnīre vel vēndere. nōnne enim et legeēs et pietās ipsa tālia prohibent? praetereā, nōnne somnia tua sunt ōmina perīculōsa? sī lemur dominum tuum quaerit pūnītum, haud mē decet tē vēndere; lemur enim sine dubiō et mē et dominum novum sānē petere potest! num quis dominōrum tam audāx est? num quis tam stultus? perīculum ā familiā meā āvertere volō, sed hospitī vel clientī trānsferre certē nōlō. nōs ergō decet tē cūrāre et remedia tibi quaerere. fortasse et dīs et lemurī sīc placēre possumus!”

Casina attonita nihil respondet. haec Valeriī verba in animō iterum iterumque volvit. tandem Valerius, “heus!” exclāmat, “tibi ad cubiculum regrediendum et quiēscendum est, Casina. hodiē enim ad templum Bonae Deae cum Caeliā Valeriāque festīnāre dēbēs, et iter longum est.”

Casina anxia, “mī domine,” rogat, “cūr ad hoc templum prōcēditur?”

et Valerius, “in hortō templī,” Casinae respondet, “sunt plūrimae herbae, quae remedia morbōrum plūrimīs aegrōtīs iam praebent. tum hodiē vespere in templō Aesculāpiī dormiendum est. nōnne deus Aesculāpius saepe somnia mīrābilia aegrōtīs mittit? fortasse vel Bona Dea vel deus Aesculapius tibi remedia praebēre potest.”

Casina, “tibi gratiās maximās agō, mī domine,” Valeriō respondet et ad cubiculum regreditur quiētum. “heus!” sēcum susurrat, “fortasse īnfāns meus lībertātem quam mortem mihi fert? nōnne enim servī aegrī, quōs dominī prope templum Aesculapiī relinquunt, sunt līberī sī forte convalēscunt? dīs dominōque grātiās maximās agō! sī enim mors mihi imminet, cum īnfantī meō erō; sī vīta manet, fortasse līberta erō; et dominus mē Valeriolae meae dōnō nūptiālī nunc iam prōmittit. grātiās maximās dīs vōbīs īnfantīque agō, quod nūntium optimum mihi fertis!”

quid respondētis, amīcī?

• As I wrote this story, and even more so as I read it in preparation for this blog post, I was struck by the many issues it raises. Issues of gender, of silence and speech, of authority and the response to authority, of freedom and slavery – we managed to pack quite a lot into a relatively simple little story! Which issues do you think would be the most productive to discuss with your students, and how would you want to shape the discussion? Are there issues you would not want to raise with them?
• What do you think about Casina’s morbus now – especially her visions of the īnfāns? Do you suppose that, at some level, the sickness and the dream might have been caused by Casina’s desire for freedom? What evidence from this or other stories might you use to support such an interpretation?
• If you accept that interpretation, I suppose it raises a number of other questions. For example, is Casina taking advantage of Valerius’ generosity and pietās? If so, is she doing it consciously or unconsciously? And would that – or should that – make a difference in Valerius’ response to her?
• Or, if you don’t accept that interpretation, what do you suppose did cause the morbus and the dreams? And how do you respond to Casina’s sudden realization about the potential for freedom if, in fact, it is a sudden realization – or at least a sudden conscious realization?
• How do you want the story to end? Should Casina recover? Should she join her īnfāns and be at rest? Should she become a līberta? Or should she go with Valeria as a dōnum nūptiāle? Or should this be one of the cases where we provide several alternate endings and let you, our lectōrēs fidēlissimī and subscribers, choose the one that works best for you?

Tune in next time, when Casina and her domina travel to the first of the two templa. intereā, grātiās maximās omnibus iam legentibus et respondentibus.