We Don't Know Yet

Do you know anyone who grew up during the Great Depression?  Pause for a moment and think about that person.  Think about the ways in which they are different from other people.  Listen to their stories, and you will understand that their childhood experiences very much formed their current personality and way of living.  They save things the rest of us throw away.  They find joy in small things the rest of us don't notice.  While no one would have wanted them to endure the struggle they had to endure, it also made them the most gritty, resilient, and resourceful generation America has ever produced.

The 24-hour news media runs out of new ways to talk about the pandemic, so they have switched gears.  They are now bringing on psychologists to predict what our kids will be like when they are adults as a result of masking and remote learning.  Given that neuroplasticity takes time, there is no way to know what is happening.  They might as well bring on a psychic to have an argument with an astrologer to talk about what these kids will be like as adults.  

The truth is we do not know what impact this pandemic will have on our students.  For that matter, we don't know what the experiences they were having before the pandemic were having.  We know they are experiencing high anxiety, but I also remember that we were talking about their high levels of anxiety before the pandemic.  What we don't know is what effect living through that anxiety will have.  Perhaps, it will make them fearful adults, or perhaps the recognition that they persevered through it will make them strong adults.  We went into remote learning almost overnight, so it is possible this will produce adults that fear sudden change is always around the corner.  It is also possible that change won't be the scary thing for them that it has been for others because they have lived through adapting to them.  The biggest fear seems to be that masking will make them all unable to interpret facial expressions and social cues.  I suppose that is possible, but it could also be that they will be better listeners or people more adept at looking people in the eye to read social cues.  Perhaps they will care more about equity.  Perhaps they will be resourceful in ways we cannot imagine.

What is most likely is that there will be a mix of people coming out of this, some more resilient and resourceful, others more fearful.  There will be some who respond to change well and others who don't.  While we like to speak in broad generational terms (like I did while speaking of the kids of the Great Depression), the reality is that they are individuals.  They will respond, react, and adapt in their own individual ways, just as they would have to whatever might have happened if there hadn't been a pandemic.  

Let's stop pretending we know the future and deal with what is in front of us.  For now, masking is necessary to keep them safe.  Could there be mental health issues that result from that?  Certainly, there could be.  What gets left out of that discussion is the mental health effect that comes from the death of a classmate.  In some places, remote learning is still the norm.  Will there be long-term impacts from that?  Of course, there will be.  It's just arrogant for us to think we know what those impacts will be.

So, instead of attempting to predict the future, let's deal with the present.  If there is a student in front of you that is struggling, support them through it.  If there is a student who is fearful, encourage them.  If there is a student who is showing resilience, cheer that on.  Do what you would have done if a student had been fearful or struggling or showing resilience before the pandemic.  It's all you can do.

Teachers, We Have to Support Each Other

This one is going to be short because I don't feel like I need a lot of words to make this point.  

I am tired of watching teachers boss around other teachers online.  

I know you think you are being helpful when you tell other teachers not to take stuff home with them, but you don't know what their school day is like.  They may not be in a place where they have any quiet in their day.  Perhaps they share a room with another teacher or have been subbing all day.  It could be that they do their best work when they are at home alone and feel more settled grading at home.  It's not your business, so let them make that decision for themselves.

You may have very strong opinions about homework and grades, but that doesn't mean another teacher has to have the same policies you do.  You aren't in the same school with the same parents and administrators.  You don't necessarily teach the same subject (The amount of homework needed in middle school math is different than it is in senior English).  You can disagree with another teacher's policies without thinking that teacher is evil.  You can even disagree without telling them you disagree.  Just because it is easy to berate someone on Twitter doesn't mean you have to.

Right now, when we aren't getting a lot of support from the public (Remember March 2020 when we were all angels?  Good times), we really need to support each other.  Right now, when we are doing our best to get our students to keep their masks on, it is not the time to give another teacher flack for giving students things to memorize.

You know how you are just doing your best to survive right now?  So is every other teacher.  Stop questioning their integrity because they still lecture.  Stop insisting that their boundaries be the same as yours.  Stop giving them a complex about their work/life balance because their balance is different than yours.  Start encouraging those who are doing things you like.  Start saying, "I see what you are doing, and I applaud you for it."  

Start giving encouragement and stop taking their energy.

Focus on One

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I spend a fair amount of time reading what other teachers post on Twitter.  I spend less time interacting with them, but I will sometimes jump in if I feel I can add something substantive to a conversation (I will not jump into an argument about things like grades vs. no grade, but I will try to encourage someone or offer perspective).  

Yesterday, there was a sadness to teacher Twitter that's hard for non-teachers to understand.  We have just finished two of the craziest weeks of the pandemic (which is saying something) because Omicron has caused so many students to be virtual and teachers to be absent; subs are short, so there's a lot of covering for each other.  I had responded to someone with weird priorities who wanted some kind of awards to have something "to show for her career" and claimed her friend had won an Emmy yesterday (even though the Emmys were in September, so I haven't figured that out).  Anyway, one of the people who responded to me said she feels "demoralized and depressed."  Another said he had a "powerless feeling."  It all added up to we are exhausted. By exhausted, I don't mean tired.  Tired can be cured by a three-day weekend and a few good nights of sleep.  By exhausted, I mean depleted.  Teachers are used to pouring out, but we usually get refilled by a variety of things.  The last two years (two months from today will mark two years since the first day of virtual schooling) have required a lot more pouring out and included a lot less refilling.  What Twitter showed yesterday is that a lot of us are running on empty.

What occurred to me as I read all of this was that these feelings aren't new.  They are just more widespread and chronic than they have been in the past.  Before the pandemic, there might be one or two really demoralized teachers in the building, and those around them can lift them up.  Anyone who has been teaching for a while can tell you that you will have a bad quarter or a semester that makes you want to quit.  I have even had a year where I thought, "I just don't know how to do this well anymore."  The difference now is that the feeling of depletion is so widespread and has been going on for so long that it is hard to remember that this isn't our normal life.

So here's my advice.  Find an experienced teacher and ask them what they do when they feel demoralized.  They have been through it before, and they have developed coping mechanisms (I'm not talking about self-care; I'm talking about real strategies).  Here's what I shared with the teacher on Twitter who responded to me about feeling demoralized.

There is probably one student in each of your classes that seems "with you."  She is the one that makes eye contact.  He's the one who hangs around after class to ask a question or tell a story.  When you are feeling depleted, that kid is your bucket filler without even knowing it.  While you are teaching, focus on that kid.  Pretend you are teaching him and don't care about whether anyone else gets it (Of course, you do care.  This is just a mental exercise).  Make that kid the reason you don't just assign reading and go sit at your desk.  It is less overwhelming than thinking about big things we cannot fix.  As that student responds, you will get a little refilling of the energy you've lost.  When he stays after to share something, your momentum will increase a bit.  It doesn't take effect in one class period, but it does work (at least for me).  After a couple of weeks, you will find you have some of your motivation back.  

February is coming, which is often a time when we all feel a little low.  This year, we are starting it after a particularly difficult January caused, in part, by people who insisted on spending Christmas break as though we weren't still in the middle of the pandemic.  It's going to be hard, so: 

• Support your colleagues.  Spend time with them in whatever way you are able.
• Hang onto the notes or drawings kids might give you.  When you feel depleted, take them out and read them and have a good cry.
• Pray for your administration.  They are tired too, and we tend to forget that.
• Focus on one student.
• Every once in a while, show a video.  It won't harm their future if you only do it occasionally.
• Realize that you are not in control, and do what only you can do.

Tell the Whole College Story

When I was a kid, my dad liked to tell my brother and me stories about his college classes.  He told us about professors who wrote with their right hand while simultaneously erasing with their left with students just expected to keep up.  I remember thinking, "I'm a good student, but I'm not good enough for that."  I was warned about professors who didn't care and classes with 300 people in them.  I was told of oral exams with questions that couldn't be answered.  The end result was fear.  I wasn't sure I would be able to handle college.

Then, I went to college and found that, while there were a few oddball professors, they were a small minority.  The vast majority of them were normal people who taught in normal ways.  I had a class or two in a massive lecture hall, but I also had classes with only seven people in them.  I had a few professors who couldn't have picked me out of a lineup, but I also had professors who knew me well and loved me and rooted for my success in their class, and they used their office hours to help their students do just that.

The first week after Christmas break is alumni week at GRACE.  It's when we have the most visitors on campus (which was nice this year after not being able to have them last year).  We have a reception for them at the first basketball game after we return, which is a fun time to catch up with their lives.  And, in our chapel service this week, we had an alumni panel.  They did a great job answering questions that had been submitted by our juniors and seniors, but they also repeated what many before have done.  They told stories of professors who didn't care and talked about giant lecture classes where no one knows them.  As we headed back down the stairs, some members of my sophomore community-building class said, "Well, now I'm scared to go to college."  My plan for this week's community-building class is to balance things out a bit.  

It's fun to tell stories about the weirdos; it's not a good story if you tell about a normal person behaving in expected ways.  It's only a good story if it is unusual, but we should probably make sure we tell them that it is unusual.  If every one of my dad's professors had written and erased at the same time, he wouldn't have survived it.  I had a P-Chem professor who talked so quietly that we strained to hear him even though there were only seven of us in the class, and we were all on the front row.   I like telling stories about him and trying to mimic the things he said at the volume he said them, but if I couldn't hear any of my professors, that would cease to be an amusing story and become a tale of how I wasn't educated.  

Something can be true without being the whole story, a lesson a try to teach my 8th-grade students when I show them the website banddhmo.org, a site which tells a lot of scary things about a chemical called dihydrogen monoxide without ever mentioning that the chemical in question is water.  It's important that we give our students a more complete picture of college.  If we only talk about how great it is, they will be disillusioned when they have difficulty with a class or have a fight with someone in the dorm.  If we only talk about the struggles, they will be afraid to apply to college at all.

So here's the whole story.  Yes, you will have some professors who are only there to do research and don't want to teach at all.  But, you will also have professors who deeply care about education and work hard to make their lessons what you need them to be.  Yes, I had a chemistry professor who didn't know who I was when I bumped into him in the hall.  I also had Dr. Halsmer, a thermodynamics professor, whose tiny office was so packed with students he was helping that one was sitting on top of the file cabinet.  In the dorm, I had some of the stupidest fights I've ever had in my life, but I also bonded with people in a way that can't happen without sharing a bathroom during exam week.  Those are the extremes, but most days are just normal days.  You'll go to normal classes where you will learn in normal ways.  You will have normal meals with normal friends and have normal conversations.  You will have a mostly predictable life peppered with a few amazing moments and a couple of horrible ones.  It's important that when we tell kids stories about college that they know we are only sharing the dream moments and the nightmare moments but that those are only the extremes.

Learning and the Brain Reflections - Concerning Behaviors and Traumatized Kids

When I was in college, I took a class in Classroom Management, where I was told that the right set of procedures would prevent most behavioral problems.  While I believe procedures are important, it is naive to think that all behavior issues come from students not knowing what to do next (some are, and you should have good procedures, please don't mishear me).  We don't teach robots that will function exactly as expected as long as we program them correctly.  We teach humans, who each come to us with a personality (not a personality type or Enneagram number, but an individual personality), a family history, a culture, a personal history, and, unless you teach kindergarten, past experiences with teachers.  They will each respond differently to our classroom climate.  Smiling at some students makes them feel secure while smiling at others can make them feel manipulated.  And, of course, it is a room full of sinners led by a more experienced sinner; so occasionally, you will have to deal with students who behave in ways that are concerning.

While listening to Dr. Ross Greene describe the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model of handling student behavior and hearing his passion for kids as he talked about his organization, Lives in the Balance, I couldn't help but think about my camp kids more than my school kids.  That's because the majority of students he works with are kids from difficult backgrounds or who have experienced trauma.  In her book, The Connected Child, Dr. Karen Purivs called them "children from hard places."  While I have to filter some of what he says through a different worldview than his (my belief that some actions come from our sinful nature and his belief that all behaviors are formed by experience), his model is still a great approach, especially for kids who have experienced trauma.  

He starts with a simple paradigm shift in the adult's thinking.  We have often spent our mental resources asking "What's wrong with this kid?" when it might be more helpful to think "What happened to this kid?"  Dr. Purvis has a similar thought with different wording; she says to view their concerning behavior an expression of an unmet need.  Both of these approaches cause us to focus less on fixing the behavior and more on addressing the source of the behavior.  Rather than a short-term, aspirin-like approach; it is a long-term, antibioticesque approach.

He then recognizes that a person with a difficult past was likely not taught the same skills as we were, so it is likely that the student doesn't possess a skill he might need to help him self-regulate his behavior.  He might be lacking executive function (decision making), communication skills (including language processing), emotional regulation, or even some cognitive processes.  All of these can be influenced by childhood trauma, neglect, or abuse; so it is important not to assume they have the skills they need.  Dr. Greene's website, livesinthebalance.org has an assessment tool for identifying the lacking skills.

Once you know what you are dealing with, he recommends a three-step approach done in teamwork with the student.  

• The first step is what he calls the Empathy Step.  It could just be called the Listening Step.  It means asking the student what they think the source of the problem is.  You may learn something you didn't expect.  Ask them what they find hard about meeting whatever expectation you have set that they aren't meeting.  
• The second step is to define the adult's concern.  Explain to the child why the expectation you have set for them matters.  Sometimes, kids think we make rules just to make rules (and if that's the case, we should re-evaluate that).  They may not realize why a rule matters until we explain it to them, especially a kid whose experience with adults is one in which the adult has exploited their power.  While you may not feel you should have to explain your rules, it goes a long way in building trust with a child whose trust has been broken.  
• Dr. Greene calls the final step The Invitation.  It involves asking the student "Might there be a way to accomplish (insert expectation) while taking care of (insert child's concern)?"  You then allow the child to make suggestions first.  This step may take a while because the solution must be realistic and mutually satisfactory.  It must result in the student meeting the expectation.  That's a lot to get out of one suggestion, so it may require some time.

If you are thinking, I will never have time to do this with every student every time there is misbehavior, don't fear.  This is not a suggestion for every student and every behavior.  There's a reason Dr. Greene's organization is called Lives in the Balance.  Most of your normal classroom management and relationship techniques will work for most of your kids.  This is to help with that one kid for whom those techniques have not worked.  Other kids will see the change in that one kid, and it will go a long way toward your overall classroom atmosphere.  Taking this approach will take a lot of time with one student, but it will ultimately save you time as the students with these problems almost always possess incredible leadership and superpower levels of observation (because they had to be able to read the mood of their abuser).

Some of the other speakers (Jimmy Casas and Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg, MD) said things that my mind connected with this as well.  I would specifically credit them with each thing they said except I don't remember who said which thing.  (By that point on Sunday morning, my brain had taken in a lot of stuff and was blending it with other things I have read.)  

• One of them talked about remembering the idealistic passion you had when you sat in the chair for your interview.  Chances are, you told them about how much you wanted to help students, not how you wanted to manage them.  You talked about wanting to inspire students, not just wanting them to comply.  When the day-to-day frustrations of the job cause you to lose sight of that, it is a good idea to revisit your core values.  You may have bad days, but what matters is that you never quit on your students.  As Manny Scott frequently says, "Even on your worst day, you may be a students' best hope." 
• It is also is important to remember that uncertainty is stressful, and all of our lives have been filled with uncertainty for at least the last two years.  Be careful of implementing ideas from "the trauma-informed classroom" approach because it is a situation where a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.  While you want to be trauma-sensitive, you don't want to pigeon-hole kids into a place where their trauma becomes their identity (which is happening in much of the trauma-informed practice movement) and do well-meaning damage.  The worst thing you can do is lower expectations for that student because you unintentionally send him the message that he isn't capable of meeting your expectations.  Rather, you should be supporting him in acquiring the skills it takes to meet the expectation.
• 
  The best thing you can do for a student who has gotten into an anxiety loop is to "loan them your calm."  In my life, I have called it having the ministry of normal.  Think about the last time you were on a flight that had some turbulence.  If you look to the flight attendant, and she looks concerned or is doing something unusual, there may be something to worry about, but if she is still serving pretzels, everything is fine.  You are borrowing her calm.  The boy in this photo is a refugee, fleeing danger in his country, and yet you see the picture of resilience and joy because the women in the photo have been telling him stories and signing songs.  They have loaned him their calm.
• Growth is not linear.  They will make encouraging progress and backslide at other times.  If you only tell them you are proud of them when they make progress, they won't want to come to you when they are having a problem.  Praise the work they are doing and the effort they are making to do better.  This doesn't mean that you don't address the problems, just that you don't communicate that you only love them when they are doing well.
• Recognize that repeated experiences establish neural pathways, which then become automatic behaviors.  A child cries to get his mother's attention.  If he doesn't get it, all he knows to do is cry louder.  When that is eventually rewarded, the pathway is established that results in his communication becoming more and more dramatic until the need is met.  If you want to change the neural pathway, you must give them a different experience.  Don't reward the behavior you don't like.  
• Risky behaviors often come from seeking dopamine, so give them healthy ways to get dopamine.  Start with establishing and reinforcing their strengths.

Finally, it is important to recognize that just because kids are resilient doesn't mean they are invulnerable.  The strong student who seems to be handling everything well, the one who never gets in trouble, the one who everyone else leans on, needs your attention too.  He is likely the strong friend for a number of students.  This can be exhausting for them, but they don't usually show it.  Check on the kids who appear to have it all together because they are often carrying the burdens of others.  

Learning and the Brain Reflections - Using Anxiety for Good

I didn't plan for this post to fall on the day after Christmas, but given how anxiety-producing holidays can be, it actually might be kind of appropriate.  Some of you make New Year's Resolutions, and while I am on record as thinking that's kind of dumb, perhaps this will help you in keeping those.  

In my last post, I talked about how neuroscientists don't think of anxiety as a negative thing, simply an inevitable one (except for two scenarios - when it is chronic or traumatic - those come with accompanying difficulties that are certainly problematic).  Normal anxiety, however, can be used for good.  Not only is it a gift from God to help you survive (too little = no response to the danger of a knife-wielding attacker), your response to daily anxieties can be a catalyst for you to do something beneficial.  They do, after all, identify what is important to you.  Once you have identified that, you can turn your fears into plans.

People with high anxiety spend a lot of time asking "What if?"  What if someone breaks into my house?  What if I get attacked while walking to the store?  What if I have a heart attack at a young age like someone I know did?  Adolescent girls spend much of their time on social what-ifs.  What if I tell my friends that I like a certain kind of music and they think I'm weird?  What if I don't drink with them and it makes them not like me anymore?  What if I fail a test?  There are potentially an infinite number of what-ifs, and the anxious person's brain will endeavor will find them all.  The first step in using anxiety for good is to recognize that each of these what-ifs reveals something we are afraid of losing (the security of my house, my physical health, a relationship).  

The second step is to turn those what-ifs into plans.  If I am concerned about someone breaking into my house, that can spur me to invest in better locks or a security system.  If I am concerned about a physical attack, it can prompt me to sign up for a self-defense class (and then perhaps teach one for other women).  If I am concerned that I'll lose friendships because of certain behaviors, it might open me up to making friends with people that make me feel more secure.  If I am fearful about failing a test, I might be motivated to put better study habits in place.  When what-ifs become plans, we have a better sense of control and can take positive action in our lives and those of others.

For students, school is a series of building stressors, and for some, those stresses lead to academic anxiety.  Part of the responsibility for that lies with adults who put too much pressure on grades and college admissions, leading students to take on AP and honors classes for which they may not be suited.  It may lead them to take on more extracurricular activities than they have time for.  Then, they experience sleep deficits that create a vicious cycle.  As a Christian teacher, I want my students to understand that God is preparing them for His plan and to match their academic (and non-academic) pursuits to that plan.  

No analogy is perfect, and they all break down somewhere, but the one comparing mental training to muscle training is pretty close.  Other than the reality that the brain is not, in fact, a muscle, you can beat this analogy to death.  It is also helpful that most students have an understanding of physical training either from sports they play or their PE classes.  

Dr. Lisa Damour, the author of Untangled and Under Pressure, says that students often feel better just knowing that there is a design to the stress level of school.  She talks to them about how you start muscle training with small weights and then build intensity by increasing the amount of weight and number of reps, and she tells them that school is like that.  In kindergarten, we give you the mental equivalent of one-pound weights.  When those get too easy, we give you the three-pound weights in first grade.  By the time you get to high school, you are doing some high-intensity "lifting" and a lot of reps.  Knowing that it is meant to get progressively more difficult can reduce anxiety because they know we aren't going to throw a hundred-pound weight at them when they are just getting good at reps with thirty pounds.

I don't get the question "When am I ever going to use this in real life?" very often, but I got it a lot early in my career.  This was when I found the benefits of the weight training analogy.  I would ask them if, while lifting weights, they ever asked "When am I ever going to need this weight to be six feet in the air in real life?"  They knew that was a silly question because the purpose of weight training isn't to put the weight at a certain height.  You lift the weight to that height because the process puts appropriate strain on the muscle to strengthen them.  Academic content is the equivalent of using the correct form to lift a weight.  It puts the appropriate amount of strain on the brain to strengthen it.  Unless you are dealing with a very grade-focused system, this knowledge can help a student recognize that a good amount of stress is useful for future learning.

We seem to be in a perpetual state of questioning traditional pedagogy and assessment.  There is value to these discussions, but I fear that, more often than not, we are simply implementing change for the sake of change.  We assume a newer method is a better method without asking what the purpose of time-tested techniques was, to begin with.  Semester exams are one of those things.  Because people don't like the stress of exams, they assume we shouldn't have them.  These same people will tell you how valuable a marathon is.  They'll tell the value of pushing the body to its limits; they'll tell you how training for a marathon is valuable because you are working toward a goal and training harder than you would have if there weren't an upcoming marathon.  They get that strain on the body is good, but they don't want to apply that to the mind.  Exams are like marathons, and studying for them is like training for a marathon.  You prepare better because of the coming challenge and push yourself.  In the end, you recognize that the strain is good for you and didn't kill you and learn that you are stronger than you previously thought.  When students experience test anxiety, I remind them that they have felt this before and they got through it.  I remind them that no one has ever died from an exam.  Relying on past and vicarious victories can reduce their anxiety to a good level, the level where they are spurred forward and finding new strength.

When you join a gym, you have a number of options.  You can work out on your own, designing your workouts around things you like or things you believe you need (treadmills, stair climbers, weights).  You can take group classes (step aerobics, spin classes, yoga).  You can pay extra for personal training.  There are academic analogs to this as well.  Prior to the pandemic, there had been a lot of discussion about whether internet access would eventually supplant teachers.  Using YouTube, Khan Academy, Crash Course, Wikipedia, etc. to learn is fantastic but it is a lot like walking into a gym and designing your own workout.  You do the things you like, but you may not know what you need or what would be the best way to progress in order to maximize your training.  What you do is beneficial, but you might get more out of it if someone with expertise and/or experience guides the process.  I have taken a couple of step aerobics classes, and when I do, it has some benefits.  Social pressure keeps me from stopping mid-workout, which I sometimes do when I am working out at home.  The teacher designs a progressive routine that keeps me from overdoing it in the beginning but also pushes me into an intensity level I would not have pursued on my own.  When I am flagging, I get encouragement from the instructor or the music on the woman on my left.  Normal school classes are the academic analog, designed by a professional to build at the appropriate pace and take students to an intensity level they wouldn't pursue on their own with the online tools they like.  The expert designs methods and pacing, and there is motivation and encouragement from the group.  If, in the gym, you want to push a little harder or find that you have difficulty with things in a group class, you can pay extra to hire a personal trainer.  They diagnose your weaknesses and give you customized training to help you overcome them.  The academic equivalent is hiring a tutor.  The group classes may give you most of what you need, but if you want to progress farther or compensate for a weakness the class helped you discover, you might need a little more individual attention.  A tutor can give you that, but it isn't something you need every day.  When students realize this is all intentional, they may not love the stress they feel, but at least they know there are options in the plan.

The previous paragraph describes a pretty ideal situation, but we all know that humans are messy, and the education system is made of humans.  For that reason, it is important to help kids recognize when something is wrong and give them tools for how to handle that.  While I've never hired a personal trainer, my understanding is that one of the things they do is teach you how to differentiate good pain from bad pain.  It is not their job to make you feel comfortable; in fact, if they don't make you uncomfortable, they are wasting your money.  It's their job to get you to lift one more pound and do one more rep than you want.  The adage of "no pain, no gain" is true.  However, there is pain, and there is PAIN.  The type of pain that leaves you sore at the end of a workout is good.  The kind of pain that indicates injury is bad and will ultimately slow your progress.  The academic equivalent of this is to recognize the good kind of mental tiredness that comes from a good, long study session and differentiate it from overwhelming burnout.  We should teach a student how to stop before that breaking point, how to change techniques or subjects at the right moment, how to advocate for themselves with their teachers, and when it is appropriate to take a rest day.  In pedagogical terms, we want them to experience desirable difficulty because if we don't strain, we don't retain.  There's a right level, and learning to operate within that level can reduce fear and use the stress to accomplish more than we know

This post is a lot longer than I anticipated, but if you would like to know more, I recommend Dr. Wendy Suzuki's book, Good Anxiety in addition to Dr. Damour's books.  Don't let our culture sell you another coloring book.  Instead, use your stress for the benefit of yourself and others.  

Learning and the Brain Reflections - Turning Down the Volume on Anxiety

We might as well face it.  Anxiety is going to be the word we hear most for the next few years.  We were already on our way there prior to the pandemic, but 2020 and 2021 have broadened the scope because more people have more to worry about.  For that reason, the theme of this year's Learning and the Brain Conference was "Calming Anxious Brains."  There were several speakers on this topic, so this post is my attempt to synthesize several speakers into a cohesive message.  There will also be a second post on using anxiety to accomplish good because of I put all of that in one post, it will be way too long.  As Andrew Watson wrote, "our students aren’t little learning computers. Their emotional systems — when muddled by the stress and anxiety of Covid times — influence learning profoundly."  Anxiety will influence more than a student's personal life.  It will affect his learning, so as teachers who care about a student as a whole person, we will have to address it.  

Let's start with this.  Anxiety isn't always bad.  To neurologists, it is not considered good or bad, simply inevitable.  Change, whether a good change or a bad one, is stressful.  Without stress, living things die, so don't read stress as bad either.  Change also bring uncertainty, and uncertainty makes us fearful.  

Another important thing to note is that we call a lot of things anxiety that are not that.  Anxiety is persistent fear and worry, but we tend to label any feeling that isn't perfectly calm as anxiety.  The semantics of that may not seem like a big deal, but identifying our emotions is helpful in responding to them.  We respond differently to anger than we do to sadness, and we respond differently to sadness than we do to fear.  If we can't describe our emotions, it is difficult to choose a proper coping strategy.

It is generally only considered to be a negative thing if it is chronic (never able to take a break from it) or traumatic (severe enough to break the dams of your coping mechanisms).  So, in spite of what the wellness industry tells us, our goal should not be to eliminate anxiety, but to turn the volume down on it so that we can function in our daily lives.  The worst thing isn't to be stressed.  The worst thing is to be numb.  

Fear serves a purpose in our lives.  We need only look to those with a rare pituitary dysfunction that leaves people without the ability to experience fear to see how dangerous a lack of fear is.  It alerts us to danger and helps us prepare to respond to it (the well-known fight, flight, or freeze response).  It's how our ancestors stayed alive in the face of bigger threats than we face.  One difference between us and them, however, is too much access to fear-feeding information.  A prehistoric woman who experienced fear when she saw movement in the grass, fearing a saber-toothed tiger, would return to her calm state after finding the sound was caused by a bird or rodent.  A modern woman who experiences fear when she hears a sound in the back yard does not return to a calm state after seeing that it was a rabbit because she thinks about the news report she saw earlier on local burglaries, googles crime statistics in her area, reads a blog post written by a rape victim, and texts a friend who affirms her fear and tells her that she can't help her feelings (which is not true, but that's for another time).  So, this thing that is meant to be a gift for our safety becomes a source of crippling worry. 

So how do we turn down the volume on our anxiety and help our students turn down the volume on theirs?  It's a complicated answer, so I'm not going to address everything here.  I would recommend a couple of books - Dr. Lisa Damour's books Untangled and Under Pressure, are based on research with teenage girls, but the strategies in them would help anyone.  Dr. Wendy Suzuki's book, Good Anxiety, has some great ideas as well.  What I will talk about below are some of the simpler things we can do and possibly implement in our classrooms, but it is by no means a comprehensive list.

1. Limit News - I know we all want to be informed, but there is a difference between being informed and doomscrolling.  As I mentioned earlier, the difference between the good anxiety our ancestors experienced and the ability we have to stew over a situation for hours is largely caused by our access to scary information.  For them, danger was a binary situation - "tiger - not a tiger," but we find ways to turn "not a tiger" into fifty hypothetical tigers by continuously linking from one fear to another.  Choose a time period in which to get your news, and be rigorous about staying to that time.  Don't read the same story on three different platforms, or your brain will think it happened three times, leading to a belief in higher frequency than in reality.

2. Recognize Reality - Anything that can be monetized can be used to manipulate us.  The Wellness Industry is heavily invested in our belief that something is wrong if we don't spend all of our time feeling great.  Since that is not possible for anyone, we will then look for something to "solve the problem," whether it is an oil, an herb, a weighted blanket, an adult coloring book, a scent diffuser, they make billions of dollars every year by perpetuating the idea that we must always be caring for ourselves as though the biggest problem in the world right now is selflessness. (By the way, none of those are bad things, but they aren't solutions to a problem.)  One of the best things I heard at the Learning and the Brain conference was when Lisa Damour said, "It is healthy to expect our emotions to represent reality.  When things are bad, the healthy response is that we feel bad about it."  We and our students have bought into the idea that we should never feel anything bad, and it leads us to pretty unhealthy responses.  Perhaps, a good approach would be to write down the trigger of our feeling and decide if our emotion matches the reality.

3. Write it Down - One of the things our brain does when anxiety is chronic or traumatic is to over-estimate the threat and underestimate our ability to cope with it.  This is due to a stress hormone called cortisol.  Our brains are only meant to experience a quick rush of cortisol during the fight, flight, freeze response, so when it is in our brains long term, our brains don't respond appropriately to the degree of the threat.  This is where writing is helpful.  It forces us to slow down long enough to think about the threat rather than just feel about it.  Write down exactly what the threat is and rate its level of danger (not everything is a level 10, but sometimes respond to everything at that level).  Sometimes, the identification alone is helpful because we don't always know what we are responding to.  

Second, write down any tools you know you have that you could employ in response to the threat.  You will then respond with more confidence.  Teaching students to do this will give them a skill they can use for the rest of their lives, so it is worth the investment.

4. Recognize the Worst-Case Scenario - We are often pumping up the power of positive thinking so much that we only allow ourselves to expect the best.  The problem with that is that the reality is rarely only the best-case scenario.  It seems counter-intuitive, but it is also valuable to consider the worst-case scenario.  For one thing, having a mental dress rehearsal of the worst-case might give us a chance to practice using our tools and figuring out what the consequences of that case would be (I often ask kids if they think I will stop loving them if they fail a test.  They giggle a no, so I remind them that their parents won't stop loving them either and that Jesus won't stop loving them even if they make a zero.)  The other benefit of considering the worst-case scenario is that we give ourselves a chance to realize that it is as unlikely as the best-case.  Reality is usually somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, so realizing that the worst might not happen can be calming.  Talking through this with students can break a worry spiral, and rehearsing it can help them break their own future spirals.

5. Breath Control - Much of our stress response happens in the autonomic nervous system.  That's difficult to consciously control, but we do have one connection - breathing.  Intentionally slowing your breathing (four-count inhale, hold, four-count exhale, hold) lowers your heart rate and blood pressure.  Counting the inhale and exhale gives you something to think about besides the trigger.  The best part is that it can be done in any situation without anyone knowing you are doing it.  Two or three rounds of breathing control during a test or a stressful conversation can be enough to turn down the volume on your anxiety to a manageable level.

6. Express and Contain - I remember an episode of Mr. Rogers in which he sang a song about expressing our anger.  It was called "What Do You Do with the Mad You Feel?" and advised punching a bag, pounding some clay, playing tag, running as fast as you can.  It acknowledges that you might have planned to do something wrong and tells you it is great to stop and do something else.  In other episodes, he talked about drawing pictures and writing our feelings.  He was a big believer in healthy expression.  We need to help kids with finding healthy expression.  For some, it may be talking, but for others, it might be throwing a tennis ball against a wall for a few minutes.  A good cry might work for some while a nice loud, controlled scream might be what others need.  It is, however, unhealthy to express all the time and in every place.  Learning when and where and for how long to express leads to healthy containment.  Dr. Damour defined containment as "pulling yourself together" in order to do what needs to be done.  She advised that we identify what the student needs help with by observing what they are doing.  If they are expressing a lot, they need help with containment.  If they are too contained, they need help with expression.  Both are needed.

7. Movement - Our brains were designed to operate in rhythms.  Morning and evening, class periods, the cycle of a week, mealtimes, etc. keep us all in a kind of sync with one another.  One of the things that happens to the brain of a traumatized person is that those rhythms are broken.  They suffer sleep disruptions, appetite changes, and disruptions in their understanding of time (We've all experienced this during the pandemic).  Helping students re-establish a sense of rhythm isn't as hard as you might think.  Having students do some synchronized movement at the beginning of the day can bring them back into sync with their surroundings.  It doesn't have to be a big involved yoga experience.  It can be as simple as having everyone take a deep breath at the same time, a stretch we do together.  You can connect it to your content by doing hand motions to show the particle movement of solids, liquids, and gases, having them show you the shape of a graph using their arms, or having a little chant about parts of speech with a hand clap attached.  Any movement that everyone does together will be helpful.

8. Routine and Predictability - One of the best gifts we can give to our students is a predictable routine.  For me, that looks like starting class the same way almost every day.  I run through the plan for the day, read a scripture, and pray before we start.  I continued to do that during remote teaching because it was one thing I could keep predictable.  In some classes, it looks like ten minutes of reading.  In other classes, it may be a quiz every Friday.  Schedules may not seem like a big deal to most of us, but for a kid experiencing anxiety, it means security and safety.  During the summer, I am the photographer at a camp for children in the foster care system.  One of the things we do for them is to post the schedule in a lot of places and ask the counselors to carry the schedule with them at all times.  Kids ask to see it frequently because it is calming for them to know what is coming next.  It doesn't mean there won't sometimes be changes or that you can't surprise your kids, but those should be interruptions to a regular routine, not a constant state of upheaval.  

Coping with anxiety is part of being human, and we should treat it that way.  We should teach our students to treat it that way.  It can even spur us to good action when it is not excessive.  I'll talk about that in another post.   It's hard in our culture not to feel like we are "failing at wellness," leading to an even higher state of unrest, but we should remind them that responding to reality is healthy.  Bringing anxiety to a productive level, not trying to eliminate it altogether, will help our students know they are human.  And that's something the wellness industry will never give them.