Psychological Physics and the Emotional Needs of Our Students

Teaching brings many demands, to be sure.  Probably none of those demands is more apparent around the holidays than the emotional needs of our students.  You see, the holidays are not a time of rest or relaxation for many of our students.  They may go home to find empty cupboards, filthy homes, family addicts, or any number of dysfunctions.  In short, for many of our students, the holidays take them away from the support network school provides and plunges them into the midst of emotional, psychological and, in extreme cases, physical survival.

Any teacher worth the weight of their sense organs can tell you that student behavior veers off "normal" or "predictable" courses leading up to the holidays.  Students that are typically quiet and industrious may begin to wander or find excuses to leave the classroom.  Students that are typically boisterous may grow increasingly so or find ways to not be present during class.  The diversion varies with each student.  Suffice to say, the classroom takes on a new and less stable psychological landscape around the holidays.

While I try not to be overly sentimental in my writing, let me describe a few situations students face in our Northwoods school:

A student's single mother has been in and out of mental health care facilities the last couple months. The student looks after his little brother at home and faces his own mental health challenges.  There isn't a lot of food in the house, and his hygiene is suspect and reflects the state of the home.  This student told me he expects to freeze to death in a gutter some day.

Another student goes home to a family that cooks and uses meth.  Holidays are great excuses to party.  The student tries to stay out of it by working as much as possible and has forcibly protected younger relatives from the pressure and abuse of family members.  Talking to this young man inspires me endlessly.  But he fights every day.

Another student battles a personal history of depression, addiction and the trauma of sexual abuse.  Her home is under police surveillance as law enforcement seeks to stop drug trafficking. She is the sole caregiver of the disabled family member living there, and she faces potential criminal charges for a life filled with emotional, physical and drug abuse she has been desperately trying to leave behind.  She works hard in school, has worked a steady job for over a month now and cries for a lost childhood and in the hopes of being loved one day.  I've never seen a student with such awareness of and desire for a better life.

Try for a moment not to pass moral judgement on any of the people I just described.  Try to just be aware of the daily reality.  Instead of thinking he should-she should or why don't? just think about the emotional and psychological space in which the student lives and operates.

Then think about teaching that student.

Think about trying to respond compassionately to each need.

Think about the other 130 students you see daily.

Think about the curriculum. Assignments, grading, feedback.

Think about the missing assignments.

Think about the school projects and activities you're working toward.

Think about the 100+ emails you get daily.

Think again about trying to respond compassionately to individual needs.

Then think about the fact that for most teachers, school isn't the most important part of their life. Maybe its family, maybe its God, maybe its personal health issues.

I'm not complaining or to trying to "top" other jobs. So many jobs have so much goin on.  But I want to acknowledge the emotional and psychological acrobatics necessary for students and staff to navigate these spaces.  Let alone to develop appropriate or healthy responses.  I want to recognize the students and teachers engaged in these acrobatics and encourage them.

In the last ten years, I have found an description of the physical world that can be helpful for students trying to navigate their own mental, emotional and spiritual life-tornadoes.  Scientific descriptors of the physical world can be analogous to functions of the inner life. In particular, consider Newton's Laws of Motion renamed Newton's Laws of Emotion.

I have used this analogy with my students to model an alternative matrix for understanding the development and behavioral reflections of underlying emotional and psychological responses to positive and negative developments in their lives.  This approach is certainly not intended for diagnostic or therapeutic purposes, and I am certainly no mental health expert.  But as a teacher I am constantly looking for ways to help students grow in self and world awareness.  Having a mechanism to analyze and translate internal realities can be profoundly empowering for students.  Also, it has the added bonus of reinforcing interdisciplinary learning.

Newton's first law of (e)motion states that an object in motion tends to stay in motion and an object at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted on by another force.  This law describes psychological and emotional inertia. Many students feel overwhelmed by emotions that rise up and seem to grow.  A day that starts with an angry word at home can spiral into a disaster with snippy comments from friends and a frustrated teacher's reprimand.  Understanding emotional vectors as "natural" or "mechanical" can give these students a way to rationalize their thoughts and feelings.  This helps students to identify "forces" that create, divert or stop particular emotions.  I recognize that thinking of one's internal experience in this way is overly simplistic, but for many students it can begin to provide the distance necessary for a growing self awareness.

What I also like about the first law of (e)motion as a teaching tool is to remind the student of the importance of their choices.  Choices have a way of creating directions in life that develop momentum.  Recognizing the lasting influences of past and current choices helps students recognize paths in their own history.

Newton's second law of (e)motion further develops the significance of the first law.  It states that the acceleration of an object produced by a net applied force is directly related to the magnitude of the force, the direction of the force, and inversely related to the mass of the object. In other words, its easier to affect the motion of objects with less mass. In emotional terms, keeping things "light" can hep you manage the internal landscape. (I understand there is a scientific difference between mass and weight.  Please excuse the license for the sake of metaphor.)

In practical terms, habits gain momentum over time and become harder to stop or redirect.  Fears accelerate as students remember that which frightened them or experience it again.  Anger, frustration, anxiety and depression all operate in a mental-emotional space that aggregates effect.  The daily anxiety about one's appearance can create a life long battle with confidence and self esteem.  Of course, there is hope in this as well.  The more a student feels successful, comfortable, valued, empowered, or even smiles, the more positive inertia is created.  The more force the student has to slow negative directions and aspects of life or to maintain positive directions. The daily affirmation of belonging can foster a hospitable spirit.

Finally, science is at its most beautiful when it makes the complex simple. Newton's third law of (e)motion elucidates for us the interconnectedness of all things by stating that for every action (force) there is an equal and opposite reaction (force).  In the face of what feels like a hopelessly endless chain of events, Newton encourages the investigation of realities (inner and outer) begin with simple symmetric descriptions.  Look for pairs.  Start with simple revelations and go from there.

This third law can help students move from being overwhelmed to focused.  As layers of social complexity add up in the maturing minds and bodies of students through the growing awareness of social dynamics, the pressures to succeed and fit in, and the foreignness of self and identity during adolescence, let alone the types of Maslow-ian needs remaining unmet, it becomes easy for the student to drift aimlessly through a series of emotions, allowing the emotional and psychological inertia of the tumult speed them where it may.  It is easy for young people to conclude that living is a series of things being done to them, but Newton's suggestion to focus on binaries encourages students to retrieve the agency that accompanies focus.

By breaking the larger picture into smaller, symmetrical relationships, the endless internal landscape becomes smaller.  Rather than thinking about crossing the continent, a person can work on taking a step and understanding that the step is more than that.  A step turns into two and two into three and so on until the wilderness of self becomes more familiar and, if not necessarily less wild, navigable.  A person simply starts where they are, looks how they got there, and picks a direction from there.

As for calculus...