Once again; this is not about me. Simply my observations, experience and long
term observations of that, and those, experiences in the classroom.
First we established how important it is to
learn your students’ names.
With this blog we will look at "validation". I believe as a person becomes an adult and
thereafter, if any reasonable amount of success in life has been attained, we
actually need less and less of this - most of us.
However …
Children need a lot of strong sincere
validation from their teachers and other influential adults, like ... say ...
coaches. From what I have seen, if a
child does not get this validation early and often, it is very easy for them to
slide off down a negative path of one sort or the other.
Validation is a tough one to define
though. What is validation? How does an adult show validation to a child
without collapsing all discipline for that child? The adult can't say, "Anything and
everything you do, or want to do, is okay, just because you're you." That
is not validation - that's a cop-out and it's also kind of cruel.
To me, validation brings into a pairing of the
"learning as a step-by-step procedure", with the occasional failure
as just a part of that procedure. And
the application of as much empathy with that child and that child's apparent
"learning style". There are
all kinds of educational specialists who
have all kinds of degrees and certifications in studying, testing and
determining this part of a child’s psyche.
Typically it’s all they do. They
interview the kid and administer a test and make a determination of that kid’s
learning style according to all kinds of markers
they memorized in the process of getting all those degrees and certifications.
They might spend an hour or two with the
child, in their office – often a strange unfamiliar and/or even threatening
environment to that child. Which means, mostly, in terms of empirical
experience, they’re full of shit.
True sincere validation, and never try to
bullshit a child on this, because they will spot bullshit instantly, is based
almost entirely on a highly developed sense of empathy. Like a highly
developed sense of balance, empathy
cannot be learned. We all have a strong
sense of balance, as humans we walk upright and without that primo sense of balance we couldn’t do
that. I believe we are also all born with
a strong sense of empathy.
Balance and empathy help us be human. And empathy is not synonymous with sympathy. Totally different emotions. The first we have naturally, the second we
have to be taught. And sympathy just pisses off the people on
the low end of that exchange. If we
express sympathy for someone, we are in essence saying, “I feel sorry for you”,
which means I feel superior to
you. I will help you because I feel sorry for you.
Never expect gratitude for sympathy. Expect resentment,
because that is what you will get most of the time – and you will deserve it.
The difference? Sympathy creates isolation and a barrier
between the ones helping and the ones being
helped. Empathy expresses, “we are in this
together, so what can we do together to fix the situation.” Sympathy is done with fanfare. Empathy is done
quietly.
So … back to balance as our analogy. As
humans who walk upright, we have quite good balance. Some of us acquire this before our first year
of life is complete, the rest are certainly within a few additional months of
that. As the father of six children, I
can say empirically that when one baby cries, every baby within earshot will
usually start crying. And this is within
hours of being born.
That is natural empathy. “One of us is unhappy, so I must be unhappy. I don’t know why I’m unhappy, but I must
be because someone else is.” As very
young babies, we see our parents walking around, our minds decide to try and
copy that, we physically practice and practice.
Holding on to furniture, then wobbling about, soon enough we no longer
need to hold onto stuff and we can begin to bang our heads into that furniture
and the walls, etc..
I was a downhill racing ski coach for many
years. I had a number of exercises for helping
my skiers to improve their
balance. Standing on one foot for as
long as possible. Doing that without
extending the arms to compensate.
Standing on each foot separately with the eyes closed for as long as
possible. Lifting weights in certain
ways to increase smaller minor muscle groups that support the more major muscle
groups. Using a bongo board – a horizontal wood plank on a large wood dowel. Lots of things like that.
In a real downhill ski race, often the
skier’s body will be at an angle of forty-five degrees, or more, acutely
perpendicular to the slope of the race course and all of their weight will be
riding on a single steel edge of the ski.
The actual surface area of that steel edge will be less than a sixteenth
of an inch and with several times normal gravity applied to the skier’s body,
at high speed, extending down through their whole body, there is no more than
maybe a foot to two feet of support on the race course surface.
It is like leaning over to one side, with
only the side of one foot on a strand of dried spaghetti, moving forward at
more than forty miles an hour – downhill – face forward – with a large sandbag
on your back. Once practiced and
practiced and practiced, with all of the other exercises included, this feels
very natural. And exciting – very, very
exciting.
Now, back to empathy. As said, we are born with a strong natural
sense of empathy. As babies, we see, or
hear, pain or discomfort, we instinctively feel threatened – we feel the pain, or discomfort we are
witnessing. As we grow older and
experience more and more of life, our cultures can encourage and develop within
us a stronger capacity for empathy. Or,
our cultures can pound it down, dry it up, until all we have left is the poor
substitute we call sympathy. If we even have that!
I can’t get into all of the personal
careers a person could pursue in life to get by. To make a living, as it is said. However, to be a teacher, a good teacher,
just like the ski racer’s sense of balance, that teacher must take the naturally
strong sense of empathy they should have held on to and practice and practice
getting into that frame of mind.
An example: the questions should be, “What does the dyslexic child
feel when they try to read? Is it confusion?
Or, is it outright panic!
Is it debilitating anxiety?” The questions, “What does the dyslexic child see and how can we fix this problem? How can we
hammer and hammer on this kid’s brain until we bang it into normalcy?” is actually a manner in which we actively invalidate
that child.
With each child, this can be unique; that
is confusion, panic or even extreme crippling anxiety. Depending, or course, on the severity of each
unique dyslexic dysfunction.
I believe it takes a lengthy period of
observation, one on one interaction, and supportive emotional involvement with
that child to determine what is actually
going on in the child’s brain. A
major key component is observation without judgement.
This period of honest non-judgemental
observation is the first step in giving
that child a feeling of validation. This period of honest non-judgemental
observation is also the primary source of a good teacher’s practicing true
empathy. Get within the child’s brain, behind
that child’s eyes, feel what that child
is feeling. That is the student the good
teacher should be teaching.
******
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comment.
Dale Clarence Peterson © 2014
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