Before my first year of teaching, a veteran teacher told me: Whatever you do, stay out of the teacher’s lounge!
She said it would be full of negative teachers, gossiping about the kids, gossiping about each other, and probably gossiping about me as soon as I left the room.
That veteran teacher’s advice ended up being. . . well. . . not that far off.
That being said, I don’t think that the advice about staying out of the teacher’s lounge is meant to be taken literally. When people give you that advice, they’re actually using “the teacher’s lounge” as a shorthand for something else.
That something is toxic negativity.
What Counts as Toxic Negativity?
There are a few types of conversations that fall under this category.
Gossip is one of them, especially if it’s really vicious ungenerous gossip that makes you afraid to open up at work.
The main type of conversation that falls into the toxic negativity category is a kind of endless, hopeless complaining.
You keep talking about something that drags you down and you’re not really getting to a point of solving it in any way.
On top of that, nobody feels better at the end of that conversation. They feel worse.
According to psychologist Nedra Tawwab, there are really three types of negative conversations: problem solving, venting and ruminating.
Problem Solving is just what it sounds like.
You’re asking for someone’s help figuring out a solution to this problem.
Venting is not Problem Solving—but it doesn’t need to be.
You just want to get something off your chest and in fact, you really may not want someone to help you problem solve. You just want them to listen to you.
Both of these are okay. Both of these are fine!
It’s good to be clear to both yourself and the other person which one you’re doing; most of us have had the experience where we just wanted to vent and someone jumps in with a solution when that’s not what we were looking for.
But both venting and problem solving are fine as long as you’re clear on which one you’re doing.
Ruminating is where you run into problems.
Ruminating is technically a synonym for chewing—specifically for the way cows kind of throw back up the grass that they eat and chew it again.
If you’re prone to this type of thinking, you probably understand why this image makes sense.
Ruminating is where you just keep thinking about something, keep thinking about something negative, keep thinking about something negative, and every time you think about it, you feel worse.
It colors your whole mood.
You put yourself in this state of mind where you’re like, this thing that’s bothering me is a metaphor for life.
When you ruminate with another person, it’s called co-ruminating.
Co-rumination often starts out feeling like venting. You’re bonding with your colleague, getting things off your chest, getting a needed break from what sometimes feels like the toxic positivity of the education world.
But at some point the tone changes—or it doesn’t change, but the conversation has gone on too long, and now you’re trying to outdo each other.
How hopeless is this job?
How terrible is this principal?
How much of a mess is this whole education system?
What do they expect us to do?
These kids. . . the parents. . . Our coworkers. . . amiright?
By the time you’re done with this conversation, not only has nothing gotten solved—which, again can be okay!—but you don’t feel like you’ve gotten something off your chest. You don’t feel lighter. You feel heavier. Whatever the other person is ruminating about with you has now added to your load, and you’ve done the same for them.
I speak from personal experience, here.
I have definitely, in both my life and in my teaching career, had the experience of complaining until people find an excuse to leave the room.
But this is something I’ve trained myself to get better at over time.
I still crave emotional honesty in my conversations, which means being negative sometimes. But these days most of my negative conversations are either problem solving or venting.
Additionally, when I’m venting, I try to be pretty careful who I vent to.
And I try to say something up front, I need to vent. Can you just listen to me for five minutes?
And then at least the person knows they don’t have to fix anything.
But also they don’t need to add to the conversation by saying, “Not only do you think it’s a little bit hopeless… It’s actually a LOT hopeless, and here’s why!”
Changing my communication habits in this way has made me a much happier person. I would have benefited from this if someone had sat me down early in my teaching career and explained the difference between problem solving, venting, and co-rumination.
You Can Always Make a Case for Despair. But you may not want to.
You can always make a case for despair. And you can always seek out information to back you up, especially in our algorithm-curated media information environment.
You could easily find a podcast or a YouTube video or a radio station right now that will back you up. 100%. You are absolutely right to despair about everything.
But if you’re a teacher, where does that leave you?
You are now walking into your classroom in the morning with your Emotional Rubber Band stretched close to its breaking point.
And your students need you to hold as much bandwidth in your emotional rubber band as you can because kids can be annoying. Kids can be frustrating. Kids yank on that rubber band all day long.
If you can avoid walking in to school in the morning with that rubber band pulled as far as it can possibly go, you have more to give to your students.
So, even if you can make a case for despair, it’s also worth asking yourself: do you want to?
True vs. True AND Useful
A good screening process to keep yourself from going down unhelpful mental rabbit holes is to ask yourself if something is both true and useful.
You don’t want something that’s useful but not true.
That falls into the category of toxic positivity.
But something can also be completely true and not useful.
There’s something called availability bias, which is that when you’ve thought about something recently, it pops into your head much more easily than if you haven’t thought about it in a while.
And so if you are constantly reinforcing something that yes, may be true, but also makes you incredibly anxious or short-tempered with students, that can be something that is true but not useful.
You want to be careful of spending too much time in that head space.
And I think that’s where the soul of that “stay out of the teacher’s lounge” advice comes from.
Because the thing about the teacher’s lounge is that if there is a lot of toxic negativity going on in there, you can end up trapped. You co-ruminate for your entire lunch break.
Then you go back to the class and the kids are a little bit annoying, proving that you were right all along.
All that being said, you don’t need to stay out of the teacher’s lounge, and you don’t need to stay positive at all times.
Sometimes you need to break that stay positive code in order to stay sane. And sane is better.
In fact, my courses for teachers are collectively called The Maintain and Stay Sane Program for Teachers, and one of them is specifically focused on managing that emotional rubber band so that you can get closer to being the teacher you came to be and enjoy teaching more.