Katy.
Katy snorting to herself in the back corner of the room.
"That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. What are you retarded?"
My blood rising. Filling my face. Turning...red.
Ash's question had been fair, and good. And more, maybe, most important: true. He had opened himself and shared a genuine curiosity about a controversial topic. A student who asked a fair, good, and true question because he had encountered something he wanted to know more about.
And then Katy.
"No, Katy. In eight years of teaching, that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Not in this room. Not ever again."
Calm hands. Not a tremor. Clear, but not raised voice. In control. Blood back down.
Katy in tears, rushing out the door. Me, sending two friends after her, so she is not alone.
Katy, four months later, asking me for a letter of recommendation for a college application. Me writing one.
A good one. Fair and good. And true.
Welcome to the Teachers Lounge. This morning's lecture: emotional intelligence.
The bagels are on me, enjoy the coffee, and if you're the last one out, please turn off the lights.
The Teachers Lounge
Welcome to the Teachers Lounge, DKos' Saturday morning foray into education. If you would like to contribute as a diarist, please send a message to orel@truman.edu. Otherwise, please read on and contribute to the conversation about this, or any other, topic in the comment threads that follow!
The Importance of Katy and Ash
Katy and Ash's story is a true one. It illustrates, for me, issues teachers deal with every day. Identity. Integrity. Reputation. Control. Controversy. Vulnerability.
Ironically, these are the very things we rarely, if ever, hear about, read about, or discuss in teacher education classrooms or student-teacher experiences. That is a shame. I'm pursuing a doctorate at Teachers College as part of a larger effort to change that.
One of the trickiest things about teaching is that we spend our days with other people. We work with the public. Put 30 to 40 people in a room, each with their own temperaments, family histories, food sensitivities, personality quirks, fears and fixations, likes, dislikes, hormone levels, and attention spans and expect them to remain seated, and focused on something of our choosing for 50 to 90 minutes at a time. Repeat that 5 or 6 times a day, and that is schooling.
Conflicts are inevitable.
Emotions are inevitable.
Logical-Positivism
Yet, the tradition of public education in America has been not only to ignore the emotional lives of teachers, students, and schools themselves, but to intentionally reduce them, or attempt to remove them, from the school experience altogether. We are not supposed to be "emotional" in school.
In the doctorate program, we call this the logical-positivist paradigm. In this perspective,
onlydefinite statements about mathematics, logic, and natural sciences have a definite meaning. (see also: wikipedia)
Yet, emotions are a reality of every human relationship. The teacher and the student. Teacher and parent. Teacher-administrator. Parent-student. Etc, etc., etc... While the logical-positivists claim meaning can only come from empirical observations (it's only true if I can see it or logically deduce it through "true" mathematical principles), a new cadre of scientists and philosophers have been recently arguing that meaning is primarily derived through emotional experience, not empirical experience.
"Because we subscribed to this false ideal of rational, logical thought, we diminished the importance of everything else," said Marvin Minsky, a professor at MIT and pioneer of artificial intelligence. "Seeing our emotions as distinct from thinking was really quite disastrous."
Other Perspectives
A few brief examples of this work:
- Antonio Damasio, in Descarte's Error, reveals studies where people who have had brain damage to the cortical areas associated with emotion generation and processing can no longer make simple decisions like choosing a blue or black pen to sign their names to a document. Other researchers have argued that attention is a function of emotional state, and that we only remember, or learn, that which we pay attention to. Combining these two streams of research should give any teacher a great deal to consider in terms of how their students' emotional lives can impact their classroom performance, I would think.
- Walter Mischel, Columbia University. Has built a body of research based on the "marshmallow experiment," where he gave 4 year-olds one marshmallow and told them they could eat it. Or, if they waited a few minutes while he did something outside the room, when he returned if they still had their marshmallow, he would give them another and they could have two. He measured how long they waited. Some went more than 20 minutes. Others lasted 10 seconds. Then, he followed up, at multi-year intervals, and found that those who waited the longest had more "positive" life outcomes on a number of variables. 210 point higher scores on the SAT, for example. Way beyond statistical chance. Fewer divorces, fewer arrests, fewer suicides, fewer bankruptcies, more graduations, more advanced degrees, more self-reports of happiness and life fulfillment. Mischel attributes this difference to "delayed gratification," which our third theorists attribute to, you guessed it, emotional intelligence.
- Salovey, Mayer, & Goleman. Golemanwrote a book called, "Emotional Intelligence" and followed it up with several others. In it, he uses Mischel, Damasio, and several others to popularize the argument made by Salovey and Mayer (of all the links in this diary, by the way, this is the one to read if you find any of this interesting- it is their original introduction of the framework of EQ, and is somewhat otherwise difficult to find) in academic journal articles that emotions are far more important in our lives than the logical-positivists claim they are. Their effort, while not denying the importance of IQ, argues that IQ is not the only boat in the water. In my reading, it nearly flips the logical-positivists on their heads. Emotional intelligence determines how successful we are in using our IQ. Here is the summary:
Emotional Intelligence
There are five innate emotional skills, or abilities, that are largely unnoticed by most people...they can be taught, developed, and used to each person's advantage in terms of creating a better life. In my argument, these are indispensable for classroom success and the creation of lifelong-learners.
- Knowing one's own emotional state. (This is part of the high-road in Ledoux's fascinating dual-path theory of emotions.)
- Managing your own emotions- consciously choosing an emotional state that is most appropriate given your situation and task-at-hand.
- Motivation. Using one's own emotions to create short and long-term motivation toward task completion (marshmallows, anyone?).
- Identifying emotional states in others. For teachers and students, this one can be critical.
- Managing emotions in others as a means of managing relationships with other people. This one is the culmination of the other four. The highest level of emotional ability, and the one that excellent teachers seem to intuitively have in their teaching arsenal(s).
Therefore, the removal of emotion from schools, as administrators and some teachers, politicians, parents, researchers, and businesspeople have advocated for so long is not so much a removal, as the application of a certain subset of emotional states. Those that represent pure logical thought. But what we're really talking about in that case, is the valuing of calmness and disinterestedness as emotional states in themselves, not that they represent the absence of any and all emotion.
What do you think?
So, why don't we prepare teachers for the emotional reality/realities they are likely to face in their careers (not only with students, but with parents, administrators, and other teachers) rather than exclusively prepare them for a logical-positivist paradigm of teaching?
If Mischel, Damasio, Salovey, Mayer, and Goleman are correct, even just a little bit, simply drilling students for correct and incorrect answers to standardized multiple choice test questions is a seriously flawed educational model in terms of life success and satisfaction. Why don't we make what successful teachers have known and understood forever, that the emotional lives of themselves and their students really matter, a more standard part of preparing teachers for their careers?
I predict that if we did, we would be arming them against burn-out, better preparing them for adapting to unpredictable classrooms conditions, and, most importantly for a logical-positivist educational culture, working directly to reduce the achievement gap and increase the quality of education for our students who so desperately need it, as well as all others.
A note
Thank you for reading this far.
You may agree or disagree, I would love to know either way.
Also, unfortunately, I buried my grandmother a few days ago, and have some family responsibilities to attend to this afternoon as a result. She was 94 years old, bright as a tack until 2 days before she crossed over, and my grief is bright and intense. But, so is my joy. I know my family feels this sense of loss because we have gained so much from her.
Please accept my apology if I am not as quick on the replies to comments as I usually strive to be.
I hope this will generate some discussion and stories of interest, nonetheless.
Have a good Saturday, and tell the people you love that you love them!