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Monday, January 18, 2010 11:34:52 AM
i heard an interview with a doctor who went to therapy to internalize strategies for rewiring his brain to associate new feelings with the absolutist thoughts that were telling him "this will never work out,” and “you are a terrible surgeon”. he didn't know that he would not be eradicating these thoughts all together, only linking new judgments to them. he now teaches ten-year-olds to analyze their self-talk by filling in thought bubbles in comic strips, helping them to take perspective and then to reflect on their own intuitive reactions to given scenarios of stress. some see that they retreat; others confront. some feel shame, failure, or sense injustice and defend what is right. he says that we have more power than we think over our feelings, and that facing disappointment can feel good or bad depending on how we look at it. the students seemed to enjoy this point, or at the very least, the activity of reading and revising comic strips and talking about ideas.
what a great activity, i think to myself. before i ‘became’ a teacher, i would have thought of trying this with my own students. but i see i have now become so indoctrinated into some standardized framework of ‘effective’ lesson planning that i suspect i would not know how to defend the lack of academic rigor in any curriculum for emotional intelligence to my principal or myself. it is not strange anymore, what is expected. it is a language i speak. and because it is superficially safer to mimic the priorities of my conservative institution, and because most of my energy is being used to implement our holy grail of ‘balanced’ literacy instruction (and attend redundant meetings, and fashion wall decor portraying the image of scholarly precision and goal orientation, and gape over convoluted data exhibiting benchmark performance of student groups existing in another time and place), i do not spend my weekends researching ways to nurture emotional intelligence or character development or spiritual health in the classroom. it is a small miracle i get away with yoga before math.
when i approached my principal about the esl position that is opening next year, she was tentative. ‘i like the idea of you as an intervention teacher,’ she lied, ‘but i like you in the classroom, too.’
i feel like a food inebriated fly that is trapped on the edge of an open window, and does not know that it only needs to fly out to be free.
yesterday i called the police on a fight that broke out behind a coffee counter in colorado springs. a man, who several customers had complained was behaving disturbingly, lunged at the barista after he was asked to leave. the clerk, so thin and gangly, bled down his face after a heavy blow, and shouted repeatedly that he would defend himself as he inched back, and back, and back. the cake display was knocked over, and i could see the strange man reaching for things to strike or throw. i fled from the shop immediately and then wondered who i had left behind in danger. as i was on the phone with the police, the attacker was eventually thrust out of the cafe by several other customers who had rushed down the stairs to save the day. i could not believe what had happened.
i am fascinated by so many hatians who contest that god has invited this earth quake as an opportunity for the community to grow stronger. randomness is only random to those without omniscience. anything can happen at anytime. people say this.
there is too much to do today. the dogs, the car, the belated birthday dinner i promised my brother, the dreaded return call to my other, who is in jail. the sun is beckoning me to my nature of wild abandon. i will sing up the mountainside and know that in another life i was someone famous.
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