Course objective:

To become one of the teachers that a student remembers above all others as having made a difference in his or her life.

Introduction
The more stress you carry around during the school day, the less effective you are at teaching and making a difference in the lives of your students. This advanced stress-free philosophy course is designed to awaken you to a process of self-discovery. By learning the cause of stress, a teacher realizes that there is an emotional and spiritual realm to teaching that he or she never before recognized. Once that teacher identifies the problem, he or she will long to discover the solution that lies dormant within. A different kind of teacher, an influential teacher, is waiting to emerge.

The Cause of Stress
The cause of the stress you feel has remained hidden or misunderstood by you. The cause of your stress is summed up in one word: resentment. Resentment is a precursor to anger and occurs when you think you have been treated unfairly. The word resent comes from the Latin root which means, literally, "to feel again." You resent your students when they misbehave or underperform. You resent administrators and other authorities that put undo pressure on you. You resent other teachers and colleagues who treat you with disrespect. You resent parents who are blind to obvious facts about their own children. Resentment turns into anger, and it is the root of nearly all of your frustrations at school and in your life. Resenting students, co-workers, parents, and even yourself is the problem. When you resent people, you are really hating and judging them. This ego-driven response of resentment causes you to become upset and express or repress that anger. Either way you lose. Once you learn to control your responses to pressure by remaining calm and not resenting the pressure, then you will be on your way to a peaceful and happy day at work each and every day. You will be stress-free.

The Cure for Stress
The complete cure for stress is simple. The secret is to be patient at all times, under all circumstances. An effective and influential teacher practices unfailing patience and forgiveness. Being patient and forgiving students, collegues, adminstrators, and parents is essential. You should forgive them all when they do wrong things or treat you poorly because they know not what they do, and because that is the only way to resist the trap of resentment and anger. There will always be stress, but changing your reaction to it will cause it to go away. Once you master your response to stress and are not angry or upset, then you will be able to correct your students properly. You will correct them without anger. A calm way of being will start to become a new way of life for you. When you are calm, you will be objective; and when you are objective, you will know just the right way to deal with each and every stressful situation that occurs in your classroom: sometimes you will speak firmly and directly when correcting a student; sometimes you will say nothing at all and simply watch him; and sometimes you will communicate all you need to with merely a glance. You will stand firm and endure difficult students, eventually winning them over with your grace and patient example. This will all have a marvelous effect. Your students will come to love and respect you. They will feel safe and comfortable. And you will marvel as you watch your classroom transform into a new and exciting place.

Becoming Stress-Free and Staying That Way
In order to acquire patience, you must first see that you lack it and could never give it to yourself. Something greater than yourself must be the Source for this patience. After you have been honest with yourself by identifying this need for patience, you will find patience mysteriously arriving in a way that it never has before. The way to see patience increase is to practice forgiveness and not being upset over small irritations and aggravations that you notice arise throughout the course of your day. It is crucial for you to learn to distinguish whether students are doing something annoying (just being kids) or whether they are doing something wrong (just being imperfect human beings). You will waste less time and energy correcting behaviors that don't necessarily need correcting. This equips you to deal with larger stressors when they arrive. Patience is your protection and the only way to remain calm so that you do not get upset and become a loser in the war against stress that is underway inside your classroom. Begin a simple discipline of self-observation that leads to greater self-awareness by noticing yourself being tempted to become upset over trivial annoyances that occur in your classroom or with your students.

The Influential Teacher provides an audio presentation in the Overcome Stress section called “Be Still & Know.” This proven technique will show you precisely how to never be overwhelmed by stress again. If you commit to practicing this exercise daily, you will find an effortless and increasing ability to control your reactions to pressure and eventually overcome stress completely.