Emo-screamo--and I don't mean the music10/25/2023 But it feels like that in the classroom these days: all experimental dissonance, vulnerable but irresponsible, bordering on the emoviolent--chaotic, screaming to be heard about personal struggles and experience of unfairness at full throated volume and so loud that any response that isn’t just as intense doesn’t even register.
According to the July 22 report by the national center for education statistics, nearly 85 %of public schools have reported negative changes and student behavior and so emotional development since the pandemic. You can read the report here which includes the statistics related to increases in classroom disruption and student misconduct, as well as in disrespect for teachers and staff, but also talks about the chronic absence of students and the effect of increased absences by teachers and staff. Not all of this is related to the pandemic. The run up to the pandemic in this country included extremely volatile and stabilizing, as well as polarizing, political events, and important but intense cultural events and shifts, such as the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements. There has also been constant media attention to school violence, which students are exposed to both terms of media, as well as parental responses and fears, and in terms of the efforts taken within schools for training, preparation, and prevention, the hope of which is to keep people safe, but potentially has increased student, anxiety and fear. And there has been constant economic and climatological environmental volatility and disasters. We ask if the kids are all right, but we also need to ask whether the families are all all right, and we certainly need to ask whether or not the teachers are all right because it has been a fact of the profession for a long time that teachers end up being the ones responsible for the emotional labor needed for whatever kind of social and emotional issues students present with, and now those issues are compounded because when teachers themselves have had to experience, economic vulnerability, illness in their own families or themselves, coupled with a reduction of professional respect by the public, and increased worries about violence in school institutions, whether K-12 or college, teachers live with chronic stress and are in danger of burnout. I love music of all kinds, so this is not a knock against any particular genre, but as a writer, the combination of words to create the portmanteau of emoviolence is just surreal. In a time where people are shut down emotionally on the one hand, but terrified on the other, and no one knows how to express emotions with healthy boundaries, but veer between repression and suppression and explosion and outburst (or personal implosion and collapse and paralysis), it seems as though that little phrase about the music from the 2000s was an auger of the future. Increasingly, people (students and teachers) "mask", meaning performing what they think is expected and hiding (protecting) how they really feel. It's also called "managing impressions." For teachers, this in part happens because we are charged not just wut teaching our subjects but pyscho-emotionally shepherding students through both developmental stages and through times of crisis. That's a triple whammy of workload, and it can lead to "toxic positivity", the idea that we can breathe, meditate, mindset, or talk our way out of tough things or that we could tutor every student through their intellectual or academic deficits toward an A in every class. Authenticity is harder to model and maintain. Directness with kindness is not easy to manage, especially when teachers are under an avalanche of hurt, their own and their students. It's no one's fault, either. Yet each of us is responsible. The life raft of education is adrift on an ocean, and we can't yet see the shore. I mean this metaphor with all seriousness. What is an academic essay? Do research papers mean anything in the advent of AI? Does writing even matter? Do students need basic math? What is public education for? What makes a "good citizen"? What makes a "good human"? My questions are devolving into questions at the core of what we once called The Humanities. In the face of global terror, global warming, economic instability, and fear and anxiety at an epidemic level in young people, what are we to do next? Emotional labor isn't going away, and we need to develop emotional intelligence to perform it. In fact, it may be the most important thing we don't really teach. We can't run screaming from the chasm opening up before us in education. Young people still need us. Into the breach, dear friends, once more... And I am not alluding to the video game.
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The Age of Fragility? Na, Bruh. Heard.10/19/2023 A student in tears. A friend blowing their stack. A coworker lashing out. An intimate partner making a sniping comment after a long day.
Sometimes we fear checking in with someone about their emotions or mental state because we don’t know if what might get shared is more than we can handle, or we don’t know what kind of services are available if they need help. We might instinctively wonder if we might be overwhelmed by someone's problems or whether they will just blow up even more. Will we know how to help? Will we know where to send them for help? Or maybe it will all feel too personal and hurt our feelings. Maybe we have compassion fatigue, and Just can’t even, as one of my favorite T-shirts reads. Maybe we have to learn not to be afraid of difficult emotions or difficult life events and to become comfortable with the uncomfortable. It isn’t always easy to “hold space” for another person without feeling that our own boundaries are being transgressed or having our own reactions triggered or emotional reserves depleted. Emergency mental and emotional "first aid” is increasingly necessary with students and even with our friends and families. We can learn to hold boundaries and hear the pain in another without becoming overwhelmed or triggered ourselves. We don’t have to fix or appease. And yet we also shouldn’t go into paralysis (freeze) or flight. Many of us vacillate between these polar reactions, either going into overdrive and trying to save others or else becoming avoidant and not wanting to deal with students’ or others’ emotionality or life issues. Sometimes we may even be concerned that students are trying to manipulate us, make excuses for not doing work or meeting deadlines, or are even practicing “attention seeking” behaviors. We may even be right! Learning to hold steady ourselves while responding and not overreacting or retreating can help us tolerate the increase of emotions in the educational setting (and everywhere else!). This is not an easy thing to learn for those of us who feel highly empathic, and many who go into teaching or service fields are highly empathic, yet we have to face the dark side of empathy: part of our coping strategy, developed in childhood, was to be hyper vigilant to the feelings of those around us in order to protect ourselves, and if we have not learned that our life does not depend upon the feelings of other people, and we are still hyper vigilant out of that early existential wound, then we tend to take on the pain of others because we are desperately trying to fix our own wounds by helping them. We cannot fix other people. We must practice emotional hygiene ourselves, which will help students and loved ones to do so. Knowing the resources that are available when a real crisis unfolds is important, but knowing when not to overreact is also a key stress management strategy. Knowing when not to take on someone else’s issues is critical. There’s an old joke: Not my circus, not my monkeys. A sign often seen tacked to office walls reads, Lack of planning on your part does not mean an emergency on mine. Letting students or others feel the consequences of actions (or inaction) is important for their growth. Over accommodation leads to learned helplessness. Lack of responding to someone leads to lower self-esteem. Supporting others as they solve their own problems is crucial to developing their bounce back skills and resiliency. Yet, we seem to break into two camps:
We are in a time when starting to learn how to accept and work with our emotions is finally being acknowledged. For those of us not used to feeling the feels, this can be overwhelming. We can be overwhelmed by our own feelings, as well as threatened by the (seemingly) uncontrollable display of emotions by others. Our first job is to understand what each of our emotions is telling us, and learning to sit in ambivalence, confusion, grief, shame, anger, all of the more challenging or unpleasant emotions. Rather than repress or suppress them, we need to work through them with mindfulness. And listen to and validate other people’s experiences (without agreeing with or accommodating them) as they work through their feelings. Trying to fix them teaches them they can’t regulate themselves. Ignoring them teaches them to be ashamed of their feelings. Both of those strategies are about covert control. Acknowledging our own fears of falling apart or the ways we were shamed by others for being sensitive is a start. Recognizing that the ability to cope with the pain of hard emotions increases our capacity for the ones we all aspire to, such as joy, delight, happiness, is also part of understanding emotional health. Shutting down any emotion blocks off the possibility of others. My Mama used to say that life is one long exercise in learning humility. It means accepting our vulnerability and asking for help. It means being grateful. It means accepting our own shortcomings and working on them. It means making generous space for others to work on theirs. It means honoring the defeats as well as the successes as all part of life. It means being glad for others' achievements. It means learning to laugh. My other favorite T shirt reads: Don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuff. While this isn’t precisely true, it’s close. Here’s something I don’t think is small: actively seeking out the good in others and telling them what you admire. And being grateful for someone’s tears because they are doing the hard work of being human, and every one of us who does this work makes it a little easier for the next person to be more fully themselves. My Mama used to say, For everything that happens in life, there are a set number of tears, and you either cry them now, or you cry them later. Heard, Mama, heard. The pressures on teachers mount every year. Before Covid, teachers were implicitly tasked with responding to family and societal pressures and deficits that we as a country overall couldn’t or wouldn’t address. We were asked, without training, to fill in the emotional gaps in broken families, to teach skills that over-worked and financially struggling families didn’t have time to teach, to intervene in all kinds of stress related problems, to manage classrooms, all while teaching every student in every mode of neurodiverse presentation, and during Covid, we were asked to take on more emotional labor, and to do so even if our own families and we ourselves were struggling. We were supposed to be the flag bearers of hope and resilience while maintaining standards and also accommodating everyone’s needs and issues.
We are in a major transition time regarding education; emotional and ethical issues need to come into classrooms more now than ever. This does not mean specific ideologies that various people might fight over or resist. It means things like learning how to listen without becoming reactive. It means learning how to have eye contact with other people without feeling overwhelmed. It means being able to listen without trying to establish a response (because then you’re not really listening) until someone is finished speaking. It means teaching people that we can slow down and be really present with each other. It means creating environments where curiosity about the self, others, and the world is fostered before focusing on information acquisition and skills demonstration, which is the predominant mode of education right now (which goes along with the money focused matter of standardized testing.) So all that’s abstract, though what does this mean in real life? There’s a myth that relationships should just flow. They might at times, but all relationships take work. That work starts with the most important relationship in our lives, the one with ourselves. As much as we all wish our parents and caregivers could give us everything we deserved and needed, they were just people themselves. They were people who may not have gotten what they needed from their parents or caregivers. Or maybe they were dealing with traumas or stressors that impacted how they treat us. There are issues of substance use, mental or emotional dysregulation, and more. The reality is that all of us have to understand and accept our Families of Origin (FOO), and then learn how to parent ourselves and heal whatever parts of us might have been wounded by those we love. I like to call this becoming your own best friend. Learning self acceptance and self-talk is a start. Doing that self work is a life-time practice, and it is part of what we need to do as we work on the relationships in our lives. Understanding whether we tend be worried or anxious about how others perceive us or whether we are self-protective by withholding our true selves, avoiding intimacy, or even sabotaging relationships is a key starting point. That's attachment theory. As teachers, recognizing relational anxiety (can look like neediness or attention seeking) or avoidance (can look like self-sabotage, lack of personal accountability, or posturing) in students can help us not take student behavior so personally and be more compassionate. We can then offer metacognitive skills to help the student into more positive ways of interacting. Sensing our own unprocessed relational wounds when we relate with others, even students, can help move a stuck relationship to a new level. As educators, we are not immune from many of the things our students deal with. We fear failure, being judged, not being valued or liked, being an outsider, and more. We have our own little negative voice that can undermine us. Learning to deal with that voice, to explore our own fears and anxieties and become more comfortable with discomfort, to re-frame negative thoughts, to do the work of relational healing means we are more capable of helping our students do that. Most wounds that happen from relationships need to be healed in relationships, just NOT the ones where the wound happened. Educators have been given an unfair burden of emotional labor in helping the psycho-emotional aspects of our students, but education is supposed to be about developing the whole human being. Accepting that teachers are human beings in their own processes and giving them more resources is paramount. Understanding that the educational environment is not just about data delivery and skills acquisition is crucial. Relationships are at the core of what it means to human, and they are messy and wonderful, but most of us are left to figure them out (or suffer in isolation) on our own, and we are even punished (or punish our students) for not being good at them. Relational, interdependent life skills should be a focus of education, a central aspect of education, not just an accidental, crisis driven Band-Aid, and teachers need to the support and training to do the real job of fostering human growth.
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