Your brain works best when it has a proper balance of neurotransmitters. The big three are dopamine (released when exposed to affection stimulation - a loved one, likes on social media, a pet), serotonin (released when you are exposed to light or when you smile or laugh), and norepinephrine (produced in response to appropriate stress levels in order to keep you alert). There are a few dozen more, however, and right now, most of us do not have a proper balance of them. Chances are your norepinephrine is at least a little high. If you haven't been getting touched very much, your oxytocin is likely depleted. If you haven't been exercising, your endorphin balance is probably a little low.
We know what happens if you are deficient in each of these, but it may be hard to predict the symptoms you will experience from a combination of deficiencies and excesses. Some symptoms may physical (muscle tension, headaches, digestive abnormalities). Others may be emotional (irritability, overreactions to minor stimuli). Some may even appear to be mental (brain fog, memory lapse, shortened attention span).
As school starts back, you have to be aware that you, your colleagues, and your students have had different experiences during the past several months. Some of your students may have received more touch than ever as their mothers were home with them all day. Some of your single colleagues have not been physically touched since March. Some students may be sensitive to sound than they were last year. Some teachers may be more irritable than their normal personalities. You may find yourself unable to remember what you were going to do next, and your students may experience the same.
High Expectations: It's important to have high standards. That's still true during a pandemic. During the final quarter of the school year, my school continued to take attendance and give assessments. Other schools in my area froze grades and essentially made class attendance optional. I am not judging those schools because I don't think anyone could have known what the RIGHT thing to do was, but I did make some interesting observations. Students who continued with some degree of normalcy and whose teachers still had expectations (with grace, which I'll address in a second) fared better emotionally than those whose schools no longer expected anything of them. I am not an expert in psychology, but I believe the reason for this was that those who still had expectations required of them understood that this crisis was temporary. Things would still matter in the future, and we were still attempting to prepare them for that future. Those students who no longer felt like anything mattered were likely to believe there was no future. One of the things I'm proudest of GRACE Christian School for last year is not panicking our students. They saw emotion from us, but they never saw panic. They knew we were sad because we missed them, but seeing us carry on every day was reassuring. (If you are an expert in psychology and believe I'm wrong, please let me know. This is just my own musing on my observations.) This is a year for high expectations.
High Grace: It is also important to have grace. While this is always true, I think it is more so now. With some exceptions, most people have walked around within an expected range of neurotransmitter balance in their daily lives. That means their actions and emotional responses have been at least somewhat predictable in the past (or at least somewhat simple to understand). This is not going to be the case this year. While all of our neurotransmitters will be out of balance, they won't all be out of balance the same way. Don't be surprised if you have more trouble holding some students' attention while others are unusually hyper-focused. Some students may need to use the restroom more often than your normal policy allows. Some may cry more easily than usual while some may show little if any emotional responses. It is going to be more important than ever that we have compassion for our students, even if we don't understand why they are responding the way they are. This is a year for high grace.
A word for parents and students: This is also a time for you to extend grace. School always involves a million details, but we can usually rely on experience to help make decisions. This year, there are more details and most of them cannot be done in the same way they have been done in the past. Your administration has spent all summer planning. I think, from the outside, it may seem like this is just an issue of space and masks, but there is literally nothing that happens in a school that hasn't been influenced by this. In the midst of their own neurotransmitter challenges, school leaders have exhausted themselves trying to think of everything they can in order to plan for it. Whether they are teaching fully online or in a hybrid situation, your teachers are learning to do a thousand things they have never done before. We are going to drop the ball sometimes. There may be days when we only get 995 of them right. We have very high expectations for ourselves, but we need grace from you just as much as you need it from us.
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