ABSTRACT
What about your school practice activity in the classroom, Section T-3, for this week? How did it go? What did you notice? Were your eyes often shining with acceptance and approval or were they more often dark with disapproval and angry frustration, even close to rage? In our culture, anger has long been used as a legitimate and useful means of influencing others and is felt to be natural. If it was really helpful in spurring our students on to do better, we could continue to do it more and more, even search for ways to be more overpowering and confounding. However, such anger is coming under question today as to how helpful it really is. Some anger is righteous, but that is something else and probably rather rare. Most anger tends to beget anger and conflict, which is not a climate for learning and growth to take place. The physical stress it engenders is also becoming a concern. We could ask ourselves two things. First, do we need to be angry, especially in the teacher role? Our charges are still learning and becoming convinced about a lot of things; they still are testing and finding out how they want to go. Our courts of justice punish adults because they have had time and opportunity to know what they are doing or not doing. Children are still learning. They are not bad yet. The second question for our consideration is, what is the purpose of our anger? Is it a punishment? Or are we hoping to impel the person to do what we want by the very energy force of anger? Or could we be hoping to threaten them into compliance by the fierceness of our anger? Our intention could be good, but more often today, it seems only to set children against us and what we have to teach them. A neutral face or a friendly, encouraging face, seem to be the most effective. We will be exploring this further. Be thinking about it and keep noticing what happens between you and your students along this vein.
