Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love Cerberus

If you’ve been reading my posts on Cerberus [Part 1 & Part 2], you might get the idea that I’m hyper-critical of these teaching styles. And while they don’t work for me, I see the value. Students benefit from exposure to various types of teachers. Archetypes are powerful for a reason, but they can be one-dimensional. No human, be she a doctor, a lawyer, a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker, is so shallow.

The dramatis personae of any school is enriched and enlivened by a healthy variety of demeanors. If my intention was only to diminish those “unlike” me, I would be simultaneously devaluing their contributions along with my own. What makes us unique is often what makes us great. I have become the teacher I am today, the person I am today, by working with, for, and around all kinds of characters.

My neurodivergence manifests in heightened mirror neuron activity. I don’t know this to be a scientific fact, but it’s my working hypothesis. I feel people, I absorb, I often know before I know. I’m learning to be more trusting of that intuition as life demystifies it. What once seemed psychic is simply a highly sensitive consciousness that catalogues and synthesizes like a background process on your PC. So much of this RAM was once used to mask this divergence. Freed from the shame of being a perennial misfit, I now have the energy to trust this intuition for what it is: the intelligence of The Self.

I remember the Cerberus archetype and how it manifested in my own education. An Ice Monarch crushed my fragile will in the fourth grade, and it took me almost 40 years to realize the gift of reconstruction. I ran into Gatekeepers at every turn… people so preoccupied with the letter of the law, they lost the spirit. And performers… I’ve been one. I am one. But I can only be what I am on my own terms.

Authenticity in me is less a moral quality than a psychophysiological necessity. The executive function in my flavor of neurodivergence is highly affected by how closely my work aligns with my Self. A work/life balance for a person like me will look different than a neurotypical employee. This is why I was miserable in the 9-5 office life before I became a teacher. I am the embodiment of Marx’s concept of alienation. If I am alienated from the fruits of my labor, I will wilt like a plant without the loving touch of the sun.

If you have followed me this far on this exploration of a particular subset of pedagogical archetypes, you hopefully see the gratitude and debt I owe to Cerberus, the three-pronged educational powerhouse.

Archetypes exist as energetic motivations in the psyche. We juggle ours throughout a day, a week, a month, a lifetime. We observe, we feel, we hear, we absorb, we assimilate, we integrate, and we synthesize it. And this composite of myriad factors becomes the uniquely human “I.”

T.S. Eliot famously said, in his sketch of J. Alfred Prufrock, that we “prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet.” A teacher meets a lot of faces and wears just as many.

The longer I teach, the more I find my own face emerging from the static. And every day, when I look in the mirror, and the slight parallax occurs between the photons, rushing at the speed of light, bouncing off my face, off the mirror, back to my eyes… I see the face seeing the face seeing the face. And for once, I’m intrigued.