On the Joy of Discomfort

by Jean Prokott

Part of an educator's job description includes insomnia, but nobody tells you that at teacher-school. It's more on-the-job training. The sleeplessness is nerves, mostly--did I remember to print those worksheets? how is that student's mental health? what if my zipper is down tomorrow?--but it's also anxiety-ridden in that instead of counting sheep, we spend hypnagogic moments counting our failures. 

We make hundreds of decisions a day, and a healthy portion of them are mistakes. Failing hurts, and it is uncomfortable, yet we tell our students they learn through failure. It's only fair we know this for ourselves. 

To reframe, we're counting the moments we learned. If a lesson plan goes awry, the students watch you flounder (if they're paying attention). If, like me, you say the phrase Netflix and chill in class thinking it's literally about relaxing while watching Gilmore Girls, you're going to sit in that for a while, and you're going to save Urban Dictionary to your Favorites bar. ​

Related reading: "Deeply Human"

Physiologically, we can attribute this to the amygdala, where emotions are processed, and which hangs out next to the hippocampus, where memories are retrieved. We recollect emotional experiences more precisely and colorfully because our brains are built that way. Theoretically, as educators, we know Lev Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, (ZPD), which they did teach us in teacher-school, and which explores the sweet spot of comprehension. In a parallel, one can look at this as emotional intelligence, this sweet spot where you feel just uncomfortable enough to remember. A student ignores or forgets a class where they are not emotionally or intellectually challenged. A student does not feel safe or confident in a class that challenges them, content or skill-wise, too much. ​

Our job is to hover in the ZPD. It's not easy to create these moments for our students, to get their hippocampi to remember how we made them feel and what we taught them. Especially because every student's ZPD is different. So is mine, so is yours. And they fluctuate. 

But, as I mentioned before, we must do for ourselves what we ask of our students. Teachers might not experience the anxiety of feeling intellectually or emotionally unsafe in our classrooms (not to be flippant, but aside from the fact that a student could kill me with a gun, or that I could be fired for saying the "wrong" thing). However, educators can find themselves complacent in the nucleus of the ZPD. Not because of laziness, but because of survival.  In those rare circumstances when opportunity and time presents itself to us, we should strive for the next layer. 

Education, as its own institutional beast, struggles to evolve on its own. For one cog to move, myriad others in the government and community must be greased. Fortunately, (hopefully), teachers have control over their classrooms. To move to the outer ring, we can challenge ourselves with new curriculum, new projects instead of tests, cross-curricular activities if the school structure can be manipulated for it. With support from our administrators and colleagues, we can set plans in motion for "hard conversations."

Related reading: "A Canvas for Challenging Conversations"

It isn't a leap to explore how this, too, is exactly how poetry works. (Everything is a metaphor, even a metaphor.) Third Eye Education is ever grateful for the conversation and new poems from poet Taylor Mali, who opened a door to the joy of discomfort by way of poetry, teaching, and shaking dice for a symbolic gamble. 

Mali's new poems, "Momentum," and "Are You Going to Come for Me'' explore the Gestaltian circumstances when we're thrust from our comfort zones. Mali tackles how one new experience can change our big picture. 

MOMENTUM

My father grew up in New York City before the war
with two brothers, a mother and father who loved him
in the way of the WASP—as best their class would allow--
a brownstone full of Irish servants, And very little joy.

That’s what my sister said. But because my father is dead
and couldn’t offer evidence to suggest otherwise,
I repeated a story he had only ever told to me.

     It was summer vacation in a rented house,
and his brothers locked him in a windowless shed--
piled firewood against the door outside—and dared him
to escape in under five minutes.

And my father, 20 years before he became my father,
tied a length of rope to a hook in the center of the ceiling
and used it to hoist one foot off the floor a heavy oaken door
stored in the shed, passing the rope through a hole
in the door where a handle once had been.

And when his brothers said Go, he began to swing
like a bell or battering ram, the heavy oaken unused door,
thudding it against the door of the shed and then its back wall
over and over again with no effort but momentum,
the oaken blade swinging against the shut door, the back wall,
then the door again. Outside, firewood flew from the pile
with each hit, and his brothers soon told him he’d better stop.
And they let him out.

I still remember my father’s face when he told me this.
But my sister says, That’s not evidence of joy. That’s just a boy
who’s willing to destroy everything around him to become free.

In "Momentum," the speaker challenges his sister on the accuracy of her memories with their father: "I repeated a story he had only ever told to me [...] his brothers locked him in a windowless shed—/ piled firewood against the door outside—and dared him/to escape in under five minutes." While the speaker uses the story as evidence of "joy," his sister interprets the story as evidence of "destroying everything around him to become free," which warps the memory of his father. This discomfort leads the speaker to rearrange his past relationship with his father, and perhaps to question whether any of his memories can be trusted. I think, here, of how this ties to the lessons I've learned in my classroom. How might I look at my prior discomforts now, as a seasoned teacher? Discomfort breeds when our Truths are challenged. Do we accept this, or do we double-down?

Related reading: "Confidence, Pubs, and Finding a Place"

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Speaking of “discomfort,” the next poem contains content
​that might make some uncomfortable. But isn’t that the point?

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ARE YOU GOING TO COME FOR ME?

Are you going to come for me? was the question
her boyfriend always wanted her to ask him,
Right before he always does! Which is weird, right?

And even though the whole class laughed and covered
their mouths like oh shit or nodded their heads
like yeah pretty much, and everyone tried to hide
their wonder in the face of her nude confession,
the boyfriend’s question didn’t actually appear
anywhere in the draft of her poem, which is where I,
as the teacher, thought it belonged. I needed
to say something wise and not get fired for it later.
But before I even knew what that might be,
a boy in the class, seventeen at most, whispered--
maybe too loud--That’s so hot!

               And all eyes turned
on him as if to say Oh, really?! while truth bloomed
crimson in his face and neck. But the boy kept on
and spoke now of need, desire, power, and permission,
as if he’d decided There is no point in going down
unless I go down hard and in flames. Stripped,
with girls watching, daring shame to come for me.
​
I gave my little speech about revealing, reviling,
and finally reveling, how secrets keep us sick,
and soon the whole class was talking about the need
of every poem for revelation, what counts as consent,
and when. Masculinity itself was maybe not on trial,
but a teenage boy was fighting hard for frailty
and the beauty of being split wide with wanting.

And all at once and together the whole class came
to know the thing you’re most afraid to put in a poem
is maybe what the world most needs to hear.

"Are You Going to Come for Me" directly addresses classroom discomfort, a textbook this-is-way-above-my-paygrade day; the speaker recounts a time while running a poetry workshop where he "needed/ to say something wise and not get fired for it later" when a student shares a sexual poem with the class. As a teacher, I think of the tight line we are always walking. What will get me in trouble?  Is the risk of a hard, but important conversation worth it? For my job? For students?. What is the difference between a teachable moment and an uncomfortable moment, and what is too teachable a moment?

Thus, Mali's brilliance here speaks to the situation, but, really, to every circumstance a teacher finds themselves in the ZPD:

I gave my little speech about revealing, reviling,
and finally reveling, how secrets keep us sick,
and soon the whole class was talking about the need
of every poem for revelation…

​In this moment, creative writing class becomes it-just-got-real class. This is the exact circumstance a student remembers, the same circumstance that impacts a teacher enough he'll write about it. The teacher and his students are equally vulnerable in this poem, especially at the end when they all “came/ to know” what they are afraid of is “what the world needs to hear.” The masterful pun at the line break reinforces that learning works best in a classroom with a strong, safe, fully vulnerable community.

Mali's poems prompt us to ask:

• How do you know if you're a successful educator if nobody--especially students--challenges you on it? Participation trophies hold no value.
• How do you know your students if they're not in the ZPD?
• How can you be an authentic teacher if you are not also a vulnerable teacher with human-like traits, such as a zipper down, accidental swearing, purposeful swearing, or lack of slang comprehension?
• Why aren't our students telling us more stories--and perhaps with them, pushing us into our ZPD as we find a way to navigate organic discussion? (And how can we use creative activities such as Metaphor Dice to nudge them into that ZPD rather than just expecting it? Mali explains this perfectly in the podcast.)
• Why aren't we sharing more of our failures with our colleagues? Why isn't there a Chart of Failures with bloody fingerprints and Post-its in the teachers' lounge?

During our discussion, Mali explained the "discomfort of ambiguity." It is imperative to understand, finally, that discomfort is not a "yes I am," or "no I am not" experience. We must be metacognitive in this process. Why did this poem make me uncomfortable? Why did the way I led that discussion make me feel uneasy? Or, when encouraging students to write their own, why am I struggling to write about this topic? Getting students to write their discomforts (whether they show us or otherwise) is the place to start. 

If you're not uncomfortable, you're not learning. These poems invite you to a challenge for your students and for yourself. One: get rid of the fill in the blank worksheet. Two: a blank sheet of paper and the word "go" is too open. Three: start with a metaphor, a book, a flame, a risk.

This is a lesson plan for Newton's First Law of Motion.

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On the Joy of Discomfort
with Taylor Mali & Jean Prokott | 5.10.2021
In this episode we discuss how embracing discomfort can help with academic growth.
​This is a two part series. To listen to part two please click here. 
Keep in mind, content in the second part may cause discomfort for some (then again, that's the point...).

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​Jean Prokott is an English teacher in the Rochester Public Schools. She is also the author of the book The Second Longest Day of the Year which won the Howling Bird Press Book Prize (available fall of 2021), author of the chapbook The Birthday Effect, a recipient of the AWP Intro Journals Award, and has both poetry and nonfiction published in numerous journals.  Learn more about Prokott online or connect via ​email.

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