Frustrations of Teaching

At my lovely place of employment, we have a weekly workshop series. I didn't even realize that I felt like it was in a rut until this last month. In July, we offered a bunch of really exciting new classes about topics I hadn't seen taught before. They were incredibly well received and well attended, and I was fortunate enough to see all of them taught! It felt really fresh and new, and like we were really getting out useful information that we cared about, and I felt that the teachers were personally connected to the classes in ways I hadn't seen before, which was wonderful.

Then August came along, and it's sadly been back to business as usual. The last two weeks of workshops have been the same old topics taught in the same old way. This has been a bit frustrating and disappointing for me to see. I have lots of friends who are teachers (in a more traditional sense), and I have so much respect for them for a million reasons, but one of the big ones is having to start from square one every time, yet still maintaining enthusiasm for the work. I see all the same kinds of people with all the same kinds of issues come to my workshops, and sometimes it really gets me down. How many people in this city have I told now that it's okay to communicate with your partner, or that it's okay to have whatever desires/fantasies you have, or that no one kind of sex is more valid than any other kind of sex? Literally hundreds. Yet with every group, I encounter exactly the same hangups. Teachers, I'm sure you have the same issue with things like reading and math. Every time you teach a topic, it's starting over right from the beginning.

A more positive way of looking at it is that it's like solving a puzzle. You always want to help a person get from point A to point B, but the way you get there is different for every person. I suppose if I were working with people more on an individual level, I would get more of the benefit of that. Occasionally, I'll have a student who has an "Aha!" moment, which is very rewarding. I guess it just doesn't happen as often with adults as with, say, five-year-olds.

A big part of my frustration is that there is very little shared knowledge in the world when it comes to sex. With other topics, people can form unofficial "study groups" and talk about what they've learned. I know lots of people who are in book clubs where they get together and talk about lessons learned from the books they've been reading. This is a great way to collectivize knowledge and take advantage of not only the things you've learned, but also what your friends have learned. It's a rare group of friends, though, that will sit around and talk frankly about sex in a non-shaming way. People often talk about sex in a gossip-y way (who's fucking whom? what does that mean for this person? etc.), but not in a learning kind of way ("well, my partner and I were talking about this aspect of our sex life the other day, and here's the conclusion we came to. what do you think?").

I feel like we could get so much further as a society if we could just talk openly and honestly with one another about sex. It would certainly make my workshops far less frustrating. Of course, I probably also would not need to have a job anymore. So, thanks to all the sexually insecure people in America for...keeping me employed? Yikes.