Lots of travel updates lately, so here’s a quick life update:
I recently signed for a job in New York at a Jewish private school just outside the city and I have a flight home. Mitch and I don’t yet have a place to live, but that’ll happen all in good time. Moving to New York City is now a real thing!
I’m feeling a lot better about the move now that work is settled. It’s a middle school social studies job, which will be new for me, but I’m pretty confident in my pedagogy and I’m excited about the school. I wouldn’t have taken the job if I didn’t think it was a good fit but too many factors aligned for it to be anything else. As it happens, I attended a Jewish school for kindergarten through grade eight, overlapped with my new head of department when I was an undergrad in the program in which she was a grad student, went to my new principal’s alma mater for grad school, and – here’s the part that sealed the deal – grew up in the town where my new head of school’s relatives live and was a member of the middle school youth group that his sister and brother ran when they were in college.
That last part, friends, is called playing Jewish Geography. Fun game. I’ve made lots of acquaintances and even friends that way, which probably makes us a rather insular group. I’d argue, though, that it’s fair to say that about every minority ethnic group. 🙂
I’ve written before about my excitement to be with Mitch again and that’s still true. If not for him, there’s no reason to leave Singapore.
And that’s what is making this so hard.
I went out for coffee with my friend Jamie this afternoon and we started talking about all the things we need to do before I leave in (gulp) just over two months. Two months and three days. Time flies. As Jamie and I chatted and planned where in the world we could meet up in the coming years (compatible teacher schedules help!) I decided that I’m ready to go, but I’m not ready to leave.
I felt such a cold sense of finality when I clicked “confirm” on my flight payment tonight. The hard part is that I feel that I have unfinished business here. I have such wonderful friends who I love and who, in some ways, I’m still getting to know. I’m not done with that.
There are students to teach, inquiry questions to address, and curricula to plan. They can get along without me just fine, but I don’t know how I’ll do without them – both the students and the teachers!
There are neighborhoods of Singapore I haven’t seen, cafes and restaurants I haven’t tried, parks I haven’t explored, and hawker food I haven’t tasted. There are amazing countries to visit that I’m closer to now than I’ll likely ever be again.
Ever is a long time.
Even after a year, plus six trips to Singapore before I moved, I feel like I’ve just arrived. I’m still learning and I’m still excited. I was so ready to leave Malaysia by the time that finally happened and I could not feel more differently now.
I also feel like I have a home here but homes are portable. Home has come to mean people, not places. I already have a lot of people in New York City and I am looking forward to being much more present in their lives. So, I’m ready to go.
Leaving? Not so much.
As Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack Dawson said in one of my favorite scenes in Titanic, “To making it count.”
I have 63 more days here. And I intend to make them all count.
It’s not a secret that I lost my 365 Photos project a few months ago because I didn’t back up my photos properly. I wrote about that here. Last night I realized that it’s not just those photos that are missing, but a lot of photos that I’ve taken, particularly between 2012 and 2014. That’s frustrating because it’s completely my own fault and a byproduct of my nemesis, impatience.
However, I also decided that it’s about time I give up on the blog posts holding empty photo links, so I deleted every one of the 365 Photos posts this morning. Maybe I’ll do another version of that project soon (and take advantage of this newfangled cloud that we’ve got). It’s likely going to take me a while to sift through the rest of my posts to determine what else I’ve lost but I’ll be deleting those, too. Let’s just call it decluttering.
Devoted Harry Potter fans should recognize this quote. Admittedly, I had to look up the book (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix), probably because it’s so long that I only read it 7 or 8 times. To summarize, Hermione is berating Harry and Ron for not understanding the very complicated feelings of Harry’s current girlfriend, Cho, whose former boyfriend was murdered by Voldemort.
It popped into my head while I was running today, and I actually started laughing, which should tell you how freaking slow this run was. Remembering Hermione’s “emotional range of a teaspoon” rant led me down a rabbit hole of emotion-related thoughts, and not only because theories of emotions was last week’s topic in DP Psych. At the recommendation of a high school English teacher who later became a colleague, I was 18 when I took the Myers-Briggs and found it to be both accurate and revealing. I’m considering taking it again because I recently heard an NPR podcast about how personality changes over time. Have a look or listen here.
All week I’ve been thinking about the theories of emotion that we study in class. We focused on two, the two-factor theory and the cognitive appraisal theory. In the past, I’ve also taught opponent-process, James-Lange, and Cannon-Bard. (I’ll leave the Googling to you for the last three.)
The two-factor theory states that there is a stimulus (thing that happens), which leads to some kind of physiological arousal (e.g. heart beating faster, palms sweating), which leads to a cognitive labeling of the situation (e.g. “This is amazing and making me happy!”), and concludes with the experience of emotion (e.g. joy). The following is a really useful image:
On the other hand, the cognitive appraisal theory suggests that we experience emotions as a result two types of appraisal, primary and secondary. As you are experiencing an event, you make a judgement about it. Then there is physiological arousal and you experience the emotion, simultaneously. Primary appraisal refers to the significance of the situation, which will impact an individual’s response, and secondary appraisal refers to how an individual feels he or she can cope with consequences, again impacting response.
While all people experience emotions differently, there are common threads to emotions that people identify as either positive or negative. To introduce this topic in class, I had my students choose a particular emotion, either negative or positive, and describe what the brain and body are doing as they experience this emotion. For example, negative emotions (e.g. stress, fear, anger) elicited responses like: sweaty palms, red face, jittery, jumpy, full of energy, argumentative, yelling, dizzy. My students described positive emotions emotions as being: giggly, affectionate, hugging, childlike, optimistic, free, eager, open. Some overlap, we also some common threads in our groups of examples.
On a personal level, I believe that I feel emotions a lot more intensely than most people. My English teacher identified this after my reaction to a reading of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” in class and subsequently suggested the Myers-Briggs. My mum tells stories of my temper tantrums as a kid, some of which I remember. She talks about dragging me up the stairs while I screamed and cried about really nothing, throwing me in the bath to calm me down. I bit a lot of pillows, but my parents only taught me that after noticing bruises on my arms. But I have also woken myself from dreams due to literally laughing out loud. I have done cartwheels down schools hallways (both as a student and as a teacher). I feel the need to hug everyone around me and restrain myself only because that’s not socially acceptable. The first time I was in a serious relationship my heart beat faster than normal for days, I lost my appetite, I couldn’t sit still, I couldn’t sleep. Someone once called the range of emotions I feel simultaneously “exhausting.” It can be.
A lot of people feel really intense emotions, and maybe the above is more normal than I think it is. Regardless, I almost always act on my emotions, positive or negative, and that’s been a problem.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to act and react more quietly, at least to the eyes and ears of others. I keep myself almost constantly busy when I’m upset to avoid ruminating because I know how riled up I will be if I let myself do that. A small change, for example, was journaling only once I’d calmed down rather than while I was upset. That can take hours. Sometimes it takes days. By the same token, emotions that are already strong like excitement and passion leave me full of jittery energy for days at a time. These days are usually very productive, despite loss of sleep that comes from said nervous energy, because if I’m moving I can stop thinking.
I have found myself muting my emotions when interacting with others. I’m probably feeling a lot more than I admit I’m feeling, whether those emotions are positive or negative. Maybe this comes from social cues about how much people are supposed to feel at once. Maybe those social cues are inaccurate and, like much of what we do, simply a social norm. And maybe others do sense that I’m not disclosing everything I could be. A friend and colleague in Malaysia describes me as guarded and he was right. Additionally, I wonder if my feelings last for longer than those of other people do. I have also found, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post (What?! Two posts in two days?!) that holding in all of those emotions has been a problem. And I do feel better when I let them out. This, I know, is normal.
What I don’t know is which theory of emotion sounds the most plausible to me. My students struggled with this, too. All are supported with empirical evidence, and therefore disputed based on other empirical evidence. Under some circumstances, I expect I act first and think later (e.g. the time the transmission blew on our boat full of passengers and we were floating in the middle of a river and needed someone on the only dock in that entire section of the river to help us with a line – definitely acted first and panicked later) Under others, however, I react based on how I think I’m feeling (e.g. being chased by lots of dogs while running in Malaysia – terror like I’ve never felt and then running faster than I’ve ever run).
If I’m totally off the mark on this, please let me know! Few feelings? Many feelings? No feelings? Feelings with no names? Comments always welcome.
Photos, travels, musings, and ideas on education by someone trying to make the world a better and more peaceful place
By Rebecca Michelle 
