Article by Cameron Semple

TEACHERS ON THE PATH LESS TRAVELLED

I

magine that you are 16 years old. You are completely overwhelmed to the point where you can’t even start an assignment without feeling like you are about to break down. Your teachers give you advice which they believe to be helpful, but in reality sends you down a spiral of further confusion; their good intentions cause you to feel like you just want to give up. This isn’t worth sacrificing your mental health. You are completely lost and no one seems to know what to do, but they make sure to tell you that you just need to do it. They tell you that you will be able to complete everything on time, even though you know that, maybe, actually, you won’t. Because you are tired. Because you have been working on this assignment at every possible moment for the last two weeks and you are burnt out. Because you get no break between this and the next assignment. Because you have five other classes that all require your full attention towards whatever those teachers think are most important.

This is what it feels like to be a student with anxiety.

In this article, I included one of the three profiles I did on teachers who struggled to complete their education for a variety of reasons. Each of their stories are different, but their personal journeys to become teachers have one thing in common: their experiences have made them more empathetic educators.

The first story focuses on Sarah Gerlinger, a New Teacher Mentor for the Los Altos School District. She has worked in schools around the Bay Area for thirteen years, ten of which she taught in the classroom.

It was February break of my junior year. I remember I had a school event; I had something that in that week, some kind of performance, and something just clicked or was a trigger for me and I told my mom I cannot go back to school on Monday.

Today, Sarah Gerlinger is a successful teacher who shares a positive energy toward every person she meets. She inspires in her students, who are facing adversity, a sense of confidence and resolve that they can get through this difficult time. She is also a new teacher mentor; working with the induction program at LASD. Her colleague Katie Hurst says, “She always has a way of putting a positive spin on things and yet still she always supporting me and my growth”.

While anxiety disorders are fairly common in the United States, people frequently do not get a diagnosis until it can get to be unbearable. “Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the U.S., affecting 40 million adults in the United States age 18 and older, or 18.1% of the population every year.

Anxiety disorders are highly treatable, yet only 36.9% of those suffering receive treatment”.

Symptoms of anxiety disorders are brushed off and assumed to " be an overreaction to discomforts and stressors that [ ] people experience.

Gerlinger explains, “In elementary school, I think I maybe thought some of the things related to anxiety were more because of my personality and because I was shy or introverted. It wasn’t until I got older that I understood that there’s a name for that. [My anxiety] increased for me as I became a teen so that was very hard to go to school everyday and even though I, technically speaking, loved school, I loved to learn, I liked to do well and I on paper did well,

but just the going to school every day was very hard and that wasn’t something I could talk about with friends.”

Anxiety looks different for everyone, which also means that everyone has different coping strategies, both healthy and detrimental. For Gerlinger, her anxiety looked like missing a lot of high school and creating a cycle of avoiding stress, getting behind with homework and being stressed by the amount of work to catch up on.

During February break of 1998, life got to be too overwhelming to go back to school for Gerlinger, who explained that, “Panic disorder in particular was very real and so there wasn’t a whole lot of forcing [my mom] could do there, it was not going to happen…” The options for alternative education high school in the late ‘90s were limited to Middle College and programs done by mail. The concept of Middle College seemed scarier than regular high school and so Gerlinger enrolled in a program that she described as being the equivalent of online courses today. “[…] It was not the rigorous experience I was used to at Mountain View High, it was just too easy and a waste of time so I ultimately… didn’t do it and just stopped”.

Despite the struggles around finding a schooling program that fit, Gerlinger refused to give up on her education.

She continued to do lots of reading and keep up with math to a certain degree. “I wasn’t interested in doing nothing. [There was] no " real plan, but just at that time I’m going to keep learning and working on myself and getting better and seeing doctors”.

“One of the things that I had to concentrate on doing was continuing to socialize to a certain degree, like that was an instruction from the psychiatrist I was working with at the time, that it’s important that you not shut the world out; you can still do something. All of those

There really wasn't a particular moment ... it was just, maybe a feeling of exhaustion or just being unable to do it anymore Sarah Gerlinger

to consider the patient’s feelings about mental illness and address their responses early in treatment. All of these measures will enhance the care of patients with anxiety”.

Since Gerlinger has been through treatment, she feels, “I am a much healthier, and I’m healthy now, and more aware of different signs and triggers and whatnot, so my life now looks very different than it did in my teens and twenties.”

I think, we as a society, still often think ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps just try a little harder,’ you know, ‘this too shall pass’, ‘you can overcome this,’ and mental health is a lot more complicated than that.

As a New Teacher Mentor, Gerlinger works with teachers for the first 2 years they work within the school district, through a required induction program. This program was created as a support system for new teachers, and it helps them clear their teaching credentials in California. Gerlinger elaborates that the support offered can look like weekly meetings with the teachers, observing the teacher’s practice, planning, and analyzing student data.

She describes “… the gist of the responsibilities is essentially coaching these teachers and meeting with them, observing their practice, giving feedback; non-evaluative feedback that’s an important part”.

There are 30 teachers, spanning kindergarten through 8th grade, in the current induction program this year. These teachers are split between Gerlinger and the other new Gerlinger’s experiences are supported by teacher mentor, Katie Hurst. Sarah explains, current research. The National Institute of Health “So once a week, I see every teacher concluded in a 2013 study that, and in addition to that, I go into classrooms “Anxiety disorders are treatable. and observe when they’re teaching. It’s a Effective treatments have been developed, and very informal process. It’s just y’know, being algorithms have been refined [...] We need present in the classroom, seeing what’s going to learn how to better administer existing on, and then there are more targeted cycles of efficacious treatments in real-world health observation, where we are really zooming in on a care environments, such as in primary care, goal area. So, I will plan with them to go observe and to inform the public via media outlets. We something they’re working on and trying, and should continue to test alternative therapies then give feedback in that area. That’s the gist for treating and preventing anxiety disorders of the job. There are other things, but that’s and to help patients whose anxiety is resistant the bulk of it. It’s a lot of driving”. to conventional treatments. Finally, we need interactions were very hard, especially ‘cuz they typically involve seeing my friends from high school where I had just left, and that was very hard, so that was part of my getting better plan”.

Eventually the plan became to enroll in classes at Foothill College in 1999 as the rest of her classmates were graduating. After 2 years at Foothill, she transferred to UC Santa Cruz.

“It got harder before it got easier, and I think that taking mental illness and mental health seriously for me, and treating it like an illness, and understanding what that meant, I needed was very important, and so for me that meant growing up a little bit, and accepting some things and falling into healthy routines.”

"I think we as a society still often think 'pull yourself up by the bootstraps' you know 'this too shall pass' 'you can overcome this' and mental health is a lot more complicated than that" Sarah Gerlinger

iLearn Classroom at District office

Natalie Axley, one of Gerlinger’s mentees, provided insight into her experience with Gerlinger as her mentor excitedly, “Oh it’s been awesome!”. During her first year teaching, Natalie worked as a long term sub within the Los Altos School District. Substitutes don’t get the same services that new teachers get. Natalie felt a bit lost during her first year.

“Sarah is super understanding and super flexible, and she always kinda knows the right thing to say to me. Like, I’m a very anxious person and she can tell when I’m kinda getting up in my head, and she’ll just say one thing, and I’ll be snapped out of it. So that’s awesome. [...] She challenges me where I need to be challenged, and she’s like ‘oh you got that’ in places where she knows that I don’t need it”.

Gerlinger said that she would like to work as a new teacher mentor for a few more years, given the experience she has from teaching at several different schools for 10 years. The idea of getting into school leadership has also appealed to her as something she could do in the future, such as working in a curriculum office or maybe, given the right environment, becoming an elementary school principal.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born and raised in the Bay Area, Cameron Semple is a junior at Los Altos High School. She studies Design, English, and Digital Media at Freestyle Academy of Communication Arts and Technology. She enjoys listening to music, drawing, petting her two cats, and playing the electric guitar in a band she formed with her friends, Feminoid. In the future, Cameron hopes to study environmental science or graphic design.