Kenley Kristofferson

As I was leaving the band room one day, I heard a booming teenage voice. When I got out the door, the hallway was lined with people watching a large young adult cursing and throwing his body around.  The shop teacher and another teacher on duty stood at the end of the hall in case something went seriously wrong.  A hundred pairs of wide Grade 10 eyes watched this boy swearing and marching toward the day, shocked and scared for what might happened next.

He looked my way as he passed and, regrettably, I said something like “Wow, such model behaviour.” I can’t remember what I said, but I immediately knew that I shouldn’t be bringing gas to the bonfire, which of course, I did.

He drew both of his middle fingers toward me and exclaimed—and this is true—“F- – – you, you band b- – – -!” Really, that’s what he said. Then he stormed out of the school and I never saw him again.

When I recounted the story to my wife, the first thing she said was: “I wonder what made him do that.” I was hoping she’d show a little more concern for me, but the fact that her first instinct was one of empathy toward the teen shows how wonderful of a person she really is.  Her first response to many situations like this is one of radical empathy.

I wonder what might happen if we approached teaching this way. What if we took a long look at what was really happening with our kids who act out, our kids who are perpetually late, or our kids who seem apathetic and resigned to participating in school.  What we’ll find is that there is, almost always, more going on than we know.

Maybe they are starved for attention, that’s why they act out.

Maybe they have to get themselves out of bed and make their own meals, that’s what why they’re always late.

Maybe they feel like no one cares about them or that they aren’t important, that’s why they’re apathetic.

In his book “Pathways,” Joseph Alsobrook recounts a time where he invites one of his outspoken students to a morning meeting before school one day. Alsobrook sat down with the student and they started talking, first about their morning, then about sports and other interests that the student had.  The student was waiting for some kind of punishment, but it never came.  Instead, he got to talk about things that interested him to an adult that was listening and empathizing.

Instead of disciplining that child over and over again, Alsobrook simply listened to him. What if we took the approach of simply asking our students questions about their lives and really listened to them?

As I get older, I find that I have to learn more about the detailed parts of my students’ interests: Social media, Pokemon Go, video games, sports, etc. However, underneath those surface parts of their lives are more timeless and eternal desires: Connection, feeling heard, validation, acknowledgment, attention, being accountable, feeling like they have value, and many others.  They are the things that we all need and that humanity will never stop pursuing.  If a student is acting out, it may be because they’re missing a core value of their life and maybe we can be the ones to give it to them.

Model radical empathy, my teachers!

-K

Disclaimer: I’m not a counselor nor an expert, but I talk to a lot of kids about a great many things related to their well-being.  Here are some patterns of experience paired with elements of mental health that I’ve learned from pro-counselors.  This is one perspective that may challenge you and that’s okay.  Allow yourself to be challenged, then consider it or never think about it again.  It’s up to you.

This past week, I met a man whose daughter was buying a cello.  She tried about ten celli and, by the end of the day, she’d narrowed it down to two.  As the girl was going through the perks of each one, her father simply asked her which one sounded better.  After a brief pause, she looked up at him and said: “It depends on the room.”

Which is so true – different instruments simply sound different when played in different rooms and the same is true with kids.   Students are dynamic individuals whose behaviour is often determined by where they are and who surrounds them.  A teenager might be goofy in English class, quiet in Physics, pensive in church, or fearful around their overbearing parents.

As educators, we’ll often talk about what a student is like when commenting on their report card or during parent-teacher interviews, but the reality is that we’re only commenting on what they’re like when they’re in our room.

One of my Grade 12 trombone players has said maaaaaaaaaybe ten words out loud over her three years with me, but she’ll howl during a sprawling story in the hallway outside the band room.

My Grade 11 bass player is the queen of sassy comments in rehearsal, but will help the drama teacher at the drop of a hat and always with warmth and a smile.

One of my Grade 10 saxophone players takes a good ten minutes to moisten her reed and get to work, but will crush it in dancing rehearsal and rugby practice.

The truth is that we don’t always know the whole story with people and often times, it depends on what room they’re in.

The original context of that cello story related to mental health and the concept of diagnosis versus looking at root causes of distress.  For example: A student can’t present their project because they have anxiety vs. A student feels anxious because presenting in front of one’s peers is a stressful experience tied in with judgement, feeling good enough, putting themselves out there, etc.  Of course they feel anxious, anyone would feel anxious about this!

The man who told me the cello story also said this to me: “Of course you have Anxiety, now take the capital off.”  I love that.

Some Grade 12 students (or first-year university ones) will start to realize their anxiety and see someone about it, then get pills to help them manage it.  As we get closer to graduation, we start to have those conversations about leaving high school.  They mention that they don’t know if they’ve made the right decision to take a year off.  They need to pick classes for college or university and have no idea where their life is going (which is normal, by the way).  They might regret registering for Pre-Med because they really want to be a writer, but their dad wants them to be a doctor and that’s the only way he’ll pay for school.  They might be scared about leaving home and moving out, or the opposite: They might be stressed out about staying at home because they just want to move-the-heck out of their house and live their own lives.

When we look back on these completely normal feelings, it’s easy to understand what they’re anxious about, but that doesn’t mean they need to be clinically diagnosed with anxiety.  They don’t need pills for it, they need to spend some time with their emotions and listen to their body because the anxiety is their body trying to tell them something.

My teaching partner often says that emotions are felt in the body and it’s something we share with our students regularly.  Our body has physical responses to what we’re feeling and both kids and adults wrestle with that.  I’ve seen students with perpetual headaches, then I meet their parents and understand exactly what’s going on.  What they’re feeling isn’t an illness, it’s a ridiculous level of stress and it’s not hard to see why.  Or maybe they have a test they didn’t study for and, coincidently (or not), have a killer stomach ache.  That’s not a stomach ache; they’re feeling stress because they didn’t prepare for something that’s important to them.  They have anxiety, but they don’t have Anxiety.

If we can recognize that, we can start to unravel what’s really going on inside our minds and bodies.  I want to leave it there for this week, but I’ll cover the perils of unpacking in a later installment of “Music Ed Monday.”  I’m not saying it’s easy (it’s the furthest thing from it), but the important work of our life rarely is.  But alas, for a different day.

-K

Side-note:
It’s amazing how much those feelings of stress relate to decision-making.  Many of the examples above are about precisely that: making decisions.  We don’t often get stressed about whether or not to choose the soup or the salad at a restaurant (unless you do, and that’s fine!) or what to watch on Netflix, but rather, about big decisions.  The gravity of making decisions during important moments doesn’t always feel good (and often manifests as stress or anxiety), but that doesn’t mean we need to avoid them.  In fact, we need to do the opposite: we need to embrace them. There is a skill about making decisions under authentic pressure and it’s really important that we develop it early on to make life more manageable down the road.  It’s hard, it’s uncomfortable, and it’s stressful… and it’s also called growth and growth is often all of these things too.

Photo Cred:

Cello – https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Vych-cTtx2M/hqdefault.jpg

Now What? – https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/article-inline-half/public/blogs/91500/2012/05/96056-92670.jpg?itok=s70_1k84

I got to spend some time in Canmore, AB (Canada) this past weekend.  You know, this place:

(http://www.owngranderockies.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/village-img.jpg

It’s a really beautiful town, but I really didn’t have a hot clue where I was going most of the time.  I’m a pretty nervous driver when I’m in a place that I don’t know very well, so I was being extra observant and extra careful.  Most of the time, being extra careful is very effective, but sometimes it makes us anxious and we actually end up seeing less.

And that was the case on Saturday afternoon.  I was going to make a left turn and, while trying to see everything, I didn’t see the car coming from my left.

It’s okay, I inched out the stoplight, travelled a foot or two and braked, avoiding an accident by about a hundred feet.  I did, however, get one of these:

Irritated driver (Photo cred: http://7days.ae/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/angry-driver-copy.jpg

You know this face and the feeling you get when you see it.  That mixture of shame, embarrassment, with a dash of anger.  I mean, who does this guy think he is?

And it’s the last point that I want to address because it specifically relates to teaching: Why is he so angry? There are a few things that happen here:

First is the surprise.  The other driver is just caught off guard and gets emotional.  His first reaction is adrenaline – I scared him and he doesn’t like that.

Second, he doesn’t like that he’s surprised and now he’s reacting with the reptilian part of his brain.  There’s a fight or flight mechanism that’s making him feel defensive.  And that defence leads to anger.

Anger is the third one.  He’s angry; or, at the very least, emotional.  He might not be angry at me immediately, but he’s angry.

As we know about emotions (but particularly anger), we don’t always think clearly when we’re in the moment.  As the old saying goes, when emotions are high, intelligence is low, and this is where the social/emotional construct gets hairy.

If it were to end here, that’d be fine.  He’s surprised, he’s emotional, he’s angry – I can deal with that.  The problem comes where he makes eye contact with you and puts his arm in the air signalling that you should know better.  He doesn’t make it about him, he makes it about you.  In fairness, I’m the one who didn’t see him, so it really is about me, really.  However, the problem lies with the arm gesture.  The problem lies with the action he takes against you.

He needed me to know that I was wrong, that “What are you doing, man? Don’t you know better?” look.  He needs to prove to me that I was wrong and assert dominance that he knew better than I did.  In short, he needs to teach me a lesson.  It’s not about driving now, it’s about power.

I have a problem with that because he’s basing all of his actions on the flawed initial premise that my inching out of the stoplight and subsequent braking was done on purpose.  The thought had never entered his mind that, perhaps, I simply didn’t see him and made a mistake.

This happens all the time, but particularly in traffic.  When you see someone cut someone else off and the person behind loses their mind, could it be that maybe the person in front thought that they had more room than they actually did? That maybe the person in front wasn’t trying to be malicious at all and, instead, just made a mistake?

In today’s case, it’s not that I didn’t know better, it’s that I didn’t see him that far away.  When some fifteen year old bumps an eighteen year old in the hallway and the older one screams “what’s your problem?!” it’s most likely that the younger one didn’t see him, thought they had more room, or simply wasn’t paying attention.  No malicious intent involved, just an accident.

Any altercation is better solved with empathy, rather being solved with power.  If you feel slighted or taken advantage of, is it real? Could it possibly be a lack of thinking? Or that the assailant maybe hadn’t thought about their action in the way that you’re thinking about it?

How many people do we know in our lives whose first reaction to all new situations is to get mad?

Something unexpected happens? Anger.

Change in the plans? Anger.

Someone didn’t do things the way that they would do things? Anger.

Someone does something that they wouldn’t do? Anger.

Instead, let’s try and put ourselves in the other person’s shoes for a second before we react.  What are they bringing to the table? What are the other possible outcomes for their action other than to slight me?

(P.S. Odds are that no one is trying to slight you and it’s all in your head.  You aren’t that important, it’s okay, neither am I, neither is anyone)

It’s hard, I know.  It’s about tricking your reptilian brain out of engaging.  Your cerebral cortex isn’t very good at reacting quickly, but it does a much better job of finding solutions.  Really, it does.

And let’s collectively agree to stop trying to teach all of these strangers a lesson.  Leave the lesson teaching to teachers and parents. We don’t always know why people do what they do, but it’s usually someone not thinking, not paying attention, or just making a mistake.

It’s okay, it’s only a big deal if you make it a big deal.  Or, I guess, if this guy does.

Let’s do our best, everyone.

-K