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Musings on ‘Guilt’ 

Angi Malderez

Spring 1989. Sunday evening. I was driving as fast as I dared down an impossibly pot-holed road in N Cyprus. I was on my way to a meeting of our teacher’s group, and I was to be the leader for that session.  I felt uneasy at having spent the weekend camping on the deserted and beautiful  golden  beach.  The evening before I’d collected driftwood with one son while the other fished, driven along impossible roads to replenish our fresh water supply, built the fire to cook our dinner, and watched the sun set over the sea as we ate and talked , then chased crabs, and lazed. That afternoon, activities had included swimming and walking and collecting carob pods and stones. What I hadn’t done was prepare very well  (at all) for the meeting. GUILT!

But another voice began arguing, ‘why should I feel guilty, it was, and still is,  the weekend. I enjoyed it, my children enjoyed it, dying words are rarely about wishing you’d spent more time at work and less with your family’, and so on. And then it struck me. And this was how my thinking went. ‘ As there is always, and will always be, more I can do to become a better teacher, I am prone to feeling permanently guilty when I am not consciously and actively doing whatever it is I think I should be doing. Perhaps others feel this way. Maybe we could start by listing all the things we do that are ‘for pleasure’, and see if or how these contribute to making us better teachers.’
It was one of the best sessions, (or so my memory now recalls). It was amazing how essential to my professional development fishing, fire-building, lazing etc. suddenly appeared! I believe others in the group felt similarly relieved.

That was the conscious beginning of my battle with guilt, which I am still fighting. How? 
•	By trying to remember the message from that Sunday in N Cyprus: anything I do can, and will if I let it, make me a better teacher. 
•	By striving to remember the lesson I learnt in Hungary, a legacy from communism, I believe: ‘daily a  person needs  8 hours work, 8 hours play, and 8 hours sleep’ ; plan into my diary ‘play’ activities with as much attention as work ones,  and after eight hours (well, sometimes a little longer) tell myself  ‘sufficient unto the day is the work thereof’...
•	By inviting  students to join me doing things I want to do -  narrow-boat canal trips, cinema  and theatre outings and so on.
•	By listing all the things I have achieved at and for work in the day/week/year.
•	By reminding myself that just because I am always discovering more things I could do, I need not translate them all to myself as ‘more things I should do’. (I used to wear a badge that said ‘If only ignorance was painful’)
•	By re-reading occasionally Guy Claxton’s ‘Being a Teacher: a positive approach to change and stress’ (1989, London:Cassell)

Why has it taken me so long to see the value in my professional life of all of that activity which I undertake  outside the world of work?  And why have my lessons about ‘play’ happened when I have been living and working abroad?  Maybe it’s the U.K. work ethic. I certainly haven’t felt so guilty about ‘play’ abroad as I do when living and working in this country. Perhaps it’s just what life is like here: I heard a conversation recently about annual leave, which seemed like a parody of a stand-up comic’s routine. It went something like this:
A: I only had a week’s leave this year.
B: Huh!  Count yourself lucky , I managed half a day!.
C: Half a day! Luxury! I got ten minutes ...’
Well, maybe not exactly those words -I did say ‘something like..’!  I certainly couldn’t have heard a conversation anything like it in other parts of Europe I know.

If ‘we teach ourselves’, in the sense that  ‘ourselves’ is what we teach, as well as the object of our teaching, then we have a responsibility to make of ourselves the most well-rounded and balanced individual we can. Hurrah! A ‘professional’ reason for feeling guilty about NOT ‘playing’!

Though I still seem to be losing my battle with guilt, I notice...

Angi Malderez
School of Education, University of Leeds,
A.Malderez@education.leeds.ac.uk
March 1999
(Anyone out there with any other strategies for beating guilt, I’d love to hear them.)