As far back as I can remember, this time of each year has meant one thing: the return to school.  My dad made up a song about it that he sang to taunt my sister and me annually; it was not so much a tune as it was just the words SCHOOL TIME!  and CHEESEWAGON! yelled over and over while we covered our ears and tried not to cry over the end of summer and our perceived freedom.  My official schooling ended right before my twenty-eighth birthday, coinciding with my move to New York and into the “real” world.  And yet here I am, thirty-two and beginning another school year.  I just can’t get away from it.

Now is different, though.  Now, the student has become the teacher.

This is laughable to me for many reasons.  For one, my residency–the final two years of my education–left me feeling about as bright as the perpetually blown-out bulb in my bathroom (the reasons why are another story for another day).  For another, dental school prepares one to drill and fill holes, not teach.  Finally, I always claimed to hate school.  This hatred reached a climax during dental school and residency.  For after a lifetime of being evaluated based on my performance, I unwittingly entered a career whose training required that my evaluations were basically a list of everything I was doing wrong.  This, apparently, would be the road to improvement.

But I moved to New York and I needed to pay rent.  So I took a part-time job teaching at a dental school.  The word is…irony.

The past four years of teaching have been quite a learning experience.  (Har har.)  I look back at that first year and can only remember being a total train wreck: fresh from my own school-inflicted war wounds, I was defensive and constantly trying to prove myself.  Much like when I was a student.  I was making it about my performance and judging that from the reactions of the students.  And as usual, I was giving my evaluators too much credit.  For they were much like I had been: tired, jaded, and just wanting to get out of there.  Not to mention dishonest and sneaky in way too many cases.  And I took that personally.  Throughout each day, my blood pressure soared each time I felt taken advantage of or disrespected (being young and female didn’t help with this).  I dealt with these injustices by getting angry and, basically, being a jerk.  Or the young, female version of a jerk, what the French call le bitch. And nothing around me or within me improved.

Then something changed.  Through various influences (see: Redeemer, Tim Keller, GOD), I began to finally get what I had been taught my whole life.  No, not how to fight cavities.  The stuff I had learned outside of school.  About being utterly messed up yet loved at the same time.  About not needing to earn that love.  And I quit worrying so much about saving a face that was never mine to begin with.  I threw away my need to perform to perfection.  I started to teach in the same way I had begun to live my life: by believing the truth and telling it.  Without a need for the perfect response, because the truth speaks for itself.  And that allows me a certain amount of detachment from the results.  Which means that though the things other people do may still bother me, I am no longer at their mercy or tied to them for my worth.  My blood pressure can level out a little instead of spiking at every little eye roll from a student.  And there are plenty of other case studies in life that allow me to practice the truth:  I don’t have to play into or pass on my family’s generationally-perfected, time-tested practice of passive aggression.  I can get over my BF-associated exclusion from the girls’ daily emails.  And I can fight the pull of my middle finger on the rest of my hand after a cabbie blindly careens around a corner, nearly hitting me.  Worst case scenario, he’d be sending me Home a little early.  Which is not to say I want that, or don’t care about these things; it’s just that my cares have been reordered.  Being loved well tends to do that to a person.  It’s kind of like the best teacher there is.

So my case study this week was the orientation speech I had to give to a new group of twenty students.  Public speaking has always reduced me to a red-faced, shaky puddle of sweat.  Now I know how much of that reaction is caused by a fear of how others see me.  Demoting that fear, reordering that care, has helped–but I’m still me.  So I gave the speech and delivered the truth without any shakiness or much flushing.  I even managed to get a few laughs (intentionally).  I walked away, releasing myself from any unhealthy attachment to their response and feeling quite the expert.  Then I looked under my arms and saw two sweat stains the size of Montana.  I gasped.  Then I laughed, and was able to do so for two reasons:  one, I was wearing a jacket over my shirt, so the students couldn’t have seen the evidence.  And two, the only one besides me who could see it made me that way.  For a reason.  And he loves my sweaty ass.  Which means the evaluation is in, and I’m doing just fine.