I was a cynical teenager. Quite early on, I had given up on thinking of school as anything other than an inconvenience. And I thought less of teachers. My understanding of teachers was that they enjoyed the anxiety they passed onto children. I was, please remember, a very cynical teenager.

So when I became at teacher, I had a lot to make up for. In fact, when I first started teaching, I’d conference with students rather than eat. I had such a guilt-ridden sense of hypocrisy for being a teacher that I made a show of my sacrifices, as though I was campaigning for respect. Oddly, after a few years, this had an unforeseen consequence: I’d built a reputation for being “chill.” Apparently, because I didn’t yell or shame a student, they mistook my resistance to judge them as inherent “chillness” when it was, ironically, an excess of personal shame.

This irony compelled me to look closer at my motives as a teacher, and I realized that I was incapable of thinking of myself as a good teacher. While I had strong confidence in content, I was doing everything else by intuition alone. I was feeling in the dark for how to do the things that mattered–develop character, challenge fixed mindsets, and encourage communities of trust. I was actually doing these things. But I had no idea how.

I felt I was always failing because I had no measuring stick for what being a successful teacher was. I had not respected my own teachers, so I had no idea whether they were good or not. If I’d had models growing up, I’d missed them in my cynical blindspots. So everything I did was subject to obsessive pre-planning, execution, and reflection. Why did that work? How did that happen? But really, it was working, so I started to take pride in my shame-driven intuition.

And once I accepted it, I realized what I was. I was a Hypocrite Teacher. A teacher who doesn’t teach as they were taught or as they learned. As teacher who regrets who they were as a student and who struggles everyday to right the wrongs of their own past. A teacher who is ashamed of who they were and who strives to make amends all the time.

Owning this identity is what compels me to start this blog. I am in the slow process of owning my hypocrite status, of integrating it into my personality. I want to discuss here both practical and philosophical trends in education at the moment, and I want to wrestle my own intuition of these things out into the open. Publicizing via a blog is part of that. But “into the open” also means for my own comprehension too. I want to understand, to take a position, and to discover how to articulate what I think teacher’s should reach for in their student communities.

So, if you feel you’re a Hypocrite Teacher too–or vehemently disagree with the concept–feel free to follow and engage, or share and elaborate on your own experience, or just join me in this self-discovery discussion. I’d welcome it. (But I also fear it of course.)