"Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand." ~ Baruch Spinoza

Educator Training

	Watercolor by Dr. Beth Erickson

Ever since the days when I played school in the basement, chalk in hand, and with my sister and our wiggly cocker spaniel as my pupils, I dreamed of being a teacher. When I was 16 and a junior in high school, I had a wonderful role model for my English teacher, and so I decided I, too, would to be a senior high school English teacher. In college, my English major and Speech minor required that I read 200 pages a night just to keep up with assignments. This was while my beloved roommate prepared bulletin boards and learned cursive for her elementary education major. No matter. I was going to be a senior high school English teacher. If I had been anything but, my life would be very different today. For my students — from gifted to below average — taught me every bit as much as I taught them. We learned to soar together, each giving the other tacit permissions to grow.

The last two of the seven years I taught high schoolers, I worked in an internationally known innovative high school in Maryland. My charge was to teach the complex skill of writing to high school students who reading level was 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade. As one might have guessed, these students were frustrated and desperate about their difficulty with learning. It was from them that I learned that the three most vulnerable words after, "I love you" are "I don't know." I had fights in my class requiring me to pull students apart about once a week. Thank heaven they always allowed me to stop the fights. In fact, I came to suspect that they saved their fights for my classroom because they trusted me. After one particularly tumultuous incident, a young man said, "You were stuck with us, weren't you?" "Absolutely not. I chose you." Which I did. Relief and incredulity rippled around the room. From then on, the fights stopped.

In addition to teaching educators, which I have described before, after I became a family therapist, I wanted to share some of the considerable knowledge I had gained in my postdoctoral studies in family therapy at The Family Institute of Chicago. So I served as Adjunct Faculty at St. Mary's College in Minneapolis where I taught courses in Introduction to Family Therapy, and Grief and Bereavement for approximately 5 years. During that time and after, I became a fixture at family therapy conferences, teaching beginning, intermediate, and advanced family therapists on a wide variety of topics. Topics of particular interest to me were those related to loss and gender relations.