Lessons In Joy

By Brittany Cufaude

In Lessons in Joy, pioneering educator Brittany Ann Cufaude reveals the most effective methods for putting us back in touch with what is at the heart of joyful and highly-effective teaching and leadership. These methods can be used by anyone, any time, anywhere no matter where one is in the practice. Drawing on stories from her own practice, she sheds light on three core values: authentic connection; learning obsession, and team interdependence. As she unpacks the wisdom within each of these core values, she leads readers through a journey that holds the power to restore or invigorate a joyful and highly-effective practice.

 

Brittany is devoted to teacher hearts, their healing, and the well-being of anyone connected to schools in any form. In this way, Lessons in Joy offers simple solutions to very complex issues. It helps you orient yourself in relationship to your calling, build authentic connections with your students and colleagues, remain curious and compassionate in your practice, and implement the highest impact best-practices. Lesson in Joy gently supports you in opening up your heart, rolling up your sleeves, and partnering with a compassionate community to better serve the children whose lives depend on it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brittany Cufaude
• Release date: Mar 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393883623

Book preview

Foreward

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul.

- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

In the beginning, I believed I became a teacher by happenstance. I was twenty-three when I applied to induction programs. The year I entered my teaching program, I was also planning a wedding for a marriage that would eventually fall apart. I was living a life of unbridled purpose. I was determined to have a positive impact on the world. I was determined to build the intact family I never had in my childhood. I knew teaching was a powerful way to effectuate social justice—a passion that touched my heart before I knew the meaning of those words. So, as a young woman in my early twenties, I believed in earnest that everything was going along perfectly according to plan—and I simply adore a plan.

This book is about teaching. In my teaching practice, I’ve taught adult women and their children in a women’s shelter, high school-aged mothers who had a place to nurse and play with their babies while they attended classes on their main high school campus. I’ve taught kinder friends, high schoolers, and generally, children of all ages. I’ve taught in English and Spanish. I spent the most consecutive years teaching as an intensive reading interventionist at a middle school. And, in some of my greatest acts of courage, I have spent years teaching other teachers. I can’t imagine a place I love more than the classroom (other than my home, Lake Tahoe, or anywhere with my son and my dog).

I no longer believe it was an accident that I became a teacher. The more I pay attention, the more I see how the patchwork of my life weaves together the personal and the professional. I believe we all have a purpose and I believe that humans who are robbed of purpose, or who have trouble finding it, wilt. A wise man once told me he doesn’t engage in hypotheticals and I have tried so hard to follow in his footsteps. I couldn’t possibly say whether purpose is destined, cultivated, found, or imposed. I can say it is a requirement of human survival and contentment.

Many people assume that teachers come to the practice because they had a positive experience in school. That is not true for me. I had mostly terrible and sometimes traumatic experiences in school. I had pervasive truancy, I struggled to read and complete tasks, and I rarely did my homework. I also shuffled between more than six elementary schools, two times leaving mid-year. Today, as a teacher, this would at the very least evoke my empathy as that is a lot for a little human to process and carry. I can also say, from years of experience, that students like me have complicated and often traumatic stories. I cannot tell you why, but none of my teachers seemed to notice much other than my failures. Many teachers pointed those out fairly brutally. I remember my seventh-grade teacher proclaimed to my mother, in front of me, that I would never be successful in any area. Teachers yelled at me, sent me to stand outside the door or to the office to be punished. All of that really hurt, but I don’t think I paid attention much to it or to much of anything going on in school. I was surviving a lot of trauma then, and that takes a ton of energy in general, but every bit of it if you are little and no one helps you. So that’s what I did: I survived my childhood, and I did a hell-of-a-job. I wish I could go back and give that little girl a hug, she was doing stellar work.

Today, I look back at student-teacher Brittany with a gentle smile. The truth I know now, that I didn’t know at the beginning of my teaching career, is that I went back into the classroom to heal. I was there for my own healing and to heal the young hearts I would be blessed enough to serve. I can only see that now after substantial work and introspection. There I was all along, putting one foot in front of the other, following time as she passed. Yet, what I can only see now in retrospect is I was, and I remain, just another human riding the sometimes-gentle current, and other times dangerous rapids, of the river of life. The river pushes on, but the texture of the experience can change in an instant: the river forks or bends without warning. Or, a rapid sends you flying into mid-air just before gravity pulls you into a current that sucks you down, tumbling amongst the rocks and the white rush of water. Life has gargled me and spit me out just to let me float along kissed by the warm sun. The river glistens. The river ripples. Yet the river is also dark, deep, and mysterious. My experience is we do not choose what we encounter, and I believe the extent that we have control is the extent to which we let go, ride along, and fully experience it all. The longer I ride, the better I am at rolling with all that comes and all that does not come. I also have a sense that so much changes and so much also stays the same. It is always water and, to live, I better stay above it as often as I can.

I am happy to say that my critical teachers were flat-out wrong. I became great in a few areas. One of my gifts is teaching. Teaching is my calling. Also, my intellect eventually became my greatest escape. At around fifteen, I became determined to be really, really smart (despite how far behind I was) and I did well in that area. Another great escape has been my perfectionism. Fortunately, I have a huge heart and, for better or worse, I see the best in every human who crosses my path. Those three tenants, of the numerous other tenants that make me Brittany Ann Cufaude, led to a teaching practice of which I am very proud. I have also been blessed to work with thousands of teachers and instructional leaders, and I have earned the respect of many. To any teacher who has ever been kind to me in my practice, who has ever encouraged me in my work, or recognized my unyielding commitment to doing what is right for all children, please know you helped heal my heart.

I wrote this book because I am worried about teachers. I am worried about schools. And, I am terrified for children, who like I was, are sitting in classrooms with overworked, under supported, and critically stressed teachers. One beautiful and magical belief I bring with me from my childhood is that I can change the world. So, I work really hard every day to make the world a kinder, safer place for everyone, especially children (big and small).

This book contains, what I will call, an alchemy of everything I have learned that has the power to heal the teacher’s heart and save our sacred teaching practice. What I know from experience is healing is slow, it takes time, and it cannot be done alone. So, this is a method, not a memoir. It is also a call to action to join a community of healing teachers. I call us Joyers because we seek to let the joy in.

To keep it simple, I have organized this alchemy into three parts and core values: 1) Authentic Connection; 2) Learning Obsession; 3) Team Interdependence. I did my best to keep this book so, so short so as to give you just a peek. If you are just surviving, a short read is my gift to you. Should you want to dig deeper and participate fully in the methodology, then join the Joyer Journey which begins with this book and continues at www.joyfulclassrooms.com. I am a big proponent of allowing everyone to pick their path, so your journey always remains yours.

I am sharing this with you because I love you, I trust you found me due to our shared purpose and calling, because you deserve joy, and because your students desperately need you.

We know very clearly that it takes just one person to transform the life of a hurting child.¹ Let that one person be you.

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1 National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. Supportive Relationships and Active Skill-Building Strengthen the Foundations of Resilience. Center on the Developing Child , Harvard University, 30 Oct. 2020, developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/supportive-relationships-and-active-skill-building-strengthen-the-foundations-of-resilience/.

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