Mental Health Month - what is psychosocial support and recovery?

[chibam]

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@Zoe7 wrote:

I am telling you, personally this, as I want you to know I have read a lot of what you have written here on the forums for a long time, and whilst I cannot always relate to your experiences, I do very much respect your insights and thoughts. This world would be a much better place if we all 'looked at the other side for a minute' and actually listened.

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Wow, @Zoe7 😲 Thank you so much! That is really nice to hear. I don't know what to say.😀🤗

Though I must confess, I suspect that all too often I get carried away with my own point of view, when I really ought to be calming down and listening to the other side for a minute, as you say.

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@Zoe7 wrote:

@chibam I had a heated 'conversation' with an ex senior staff member around respect. Her view was that every child should respect all adults. The school I worked at had a lot of children from backgrounds that were not so great - so my statement to her was 'how can you expect these children to respect adults when all they see from then is hurt and pain? In essence you are saying that they should be respecting their abusers". She, of course, did not have an answer to that. I also said that we as adult (and role models) need to show that respect first for those children to know what it is like to be respected and to follow in our footsteps. Again, she had no answer. My point here is pretty simple, show respect to get respect.

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TBH, I am at a loss to understand how people don't carry this basic knowledge on from their own childhoods. Did they really ever respect adults who had no respect for them? They might have feared such adults; they might have impeccably obeyed them. But did they respect them?

I was something of a problem child at elementary school, and you could easily draw a line between which authority figures I was a problem for, and which ones I was not. The ones who I was most eager to please were the ones who showed me respect. In fact I remember an interview once where my dad constantly refered to me as "a Jekyll and Hyde", because the differances in my behavior in various settings were so stark.

I also remember a particular teacher in highschool. This was a guy who ruled his class by fear. There was never any horseplay or misbehavior in that class. Everybody always say perfectly still and listened carefully. The exam results were always commendable. But we didn't respect him; we feared him. When we got to the end of Yr. 11 and we had the curriculum freedom to drop a subject, so many of that class dropped out. But we weren't dropping the subject, we were dropping the teacher. I remember, when our very last lesson in there finished, we all came together and hugged one another as if we'd just been liberated from a refugee camp. You didn't see scenes like that outside the classrooms of other students who dropped their various subjects simply to reduce their study load.

Obediance and order are not the same thing as respect.

The point I'm trying to make is, your statement rings true on every note.🙂

[RachSANECEO]

Thanks everyone for such great engagement on this post. Shall we try and do another of these? Short video + discussion? 

Hit the Thumbs up for yes.  

[ArraDreaming]

definitely

[Zoe7]

@RachSANECEO Absolutely - love this idea 👍

@chibam Sorry for the delayed response - been hard on my end being back at work and in constant pain.

I think you do see 'the other side' often. We can speak from our own experiences - as you do - but through these forums, we see so many different sides and that certainly opens our eyes to everyone's experiences.

You are so right - obedience and order are NOT the same as respect. As teachers, we have a duty to treat each and every little person as an individual and in that respect, also treat them each as valuable, unique and important - so often I see this as not being the case and it really saddens me. I feel there are many teachers that should not be in the job - ticking boxes and pushing through a curriculum is not teaching the whole child, nor is it inclusive of every child. We need to 'teach' to their strengths and help build their weaknbesses up in a way that is individual to the child - and ALWAYS build a realtionship and get to know the child first otherwise the afore mentioned is not possible. I have a feeling you would of been one of those kids I would have connected with and I am so sorry you were not treated as well as you should have been - no child is a 'problem' child - the 'problem' is with the adults not knowing how to help.

[chibam]

It's a wonderful dream, @Zoe7 . But isn't that idea of catering to each child as an individual a bit ideallistic, in terms of what can be done with finite resources? I can't help but think about that exchange in the movie 'Parenthood', where Steve Martin and Mary Steenburgen are summoned in to meet with their son's principal:

"There are 30 kids in the class. We've estimated that the teacher spends 30% of her time dealing just with your son. The rest of the class are going to finish the school year well behind the other classes." (paraphrased)

So are you thinking of greatly reducing the teacher to student ratios? I can't see how else we could deliver the level of tailored care your talking about. And that, in itself would be quite a challenge, as my understanding is that the education industry is currantly struggling to meet it's existing teacher positions.

In many ways, I can't fault my teachers, even my bad teachers for having a job to do. It's not a glamorous life, afterall, and you do have to meet those targets. But all my teachers were in that same predicament. The difference between the good ones and the bad ones was that the good ones resolved their grievances calmly and rationally; whereas the bad ones did it with anger, or by calling down mum and dad's wrath upon us. With a good teacher, the displeasing incident was resolved in the classroom. It never went home.

They were all playing to the same end: getting the student to fit in to an established curriculum. But the good teachers had a much better technique.

[Zoe7]

Not a dream or idealistic at all @chibam I have 25 kids (which is a smaller class than some) but spread across 2 grades, a lot of varying levels within those, several kids out at differing times for additional support and one part-time student. I have a program that caters for all of those levels as well as the differing learning needs of all students. It is a lot of work to organise but when you have already built up a great relationship with the kids (and know then well), it is possible to do. We generally do the same curriculum subjects at the same time but the tasks they all do are different (according to their level, learning styles and need). 

Most of the issues with finding teachers (and teachers leaving) is not to do with the kids - it is the immense amount of extra admin work that is piled up on top of the actual teaching. In essence, we are now doing 2 jobs at once and it is often the teaching program that suffers (and ultimately teachers lose their passion for the job and leave) ...but my kids always come first.

[chibam]

Hmm. That's surprising to hear, @Zoe7 . To be honest, I have trouble imagining how that works in practice. It sounds too good to be true.

Do you ever feel like your burning yourself out?

I just can't help but reflect back on my own schooling, and how everything was done to a "one size fits all" approach. I mean we often got to choose our own topics when we were sent off to do assignments, but in terms of the classroom work, we all pretty much had to be on the same page at the same time.

[Zoe7]

That's the problem with so much of the education system @chibam one size does not fit all and if you are to truly get the best out of your kids then you firstly need to realise that and secondly put things in place to both allow for those differences as well as learning styles. It really is not that hard to do - takes time and planning - but do-able. I suppose being a teacher with lots of experience helps but the training for teachers does not equip them with enough knowledge nor experience. Theory is great, but in its place. Student teachers need more in-school experiences.

[chibam]

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@Zoe7 wrote:

..one size does not fit all...

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Believe me, I know. 😉 Makes it so inconvienient for the bosses, doesn't it? So inconvienient for those of us on the conveyor belt, too.

I'm reminded of this one lesson we had once - I think it was in 1st grade. The teacher was teaching us how to draw floorplans. She talked us all through a floorplan of the classroom she'd drawn on the blackboard as an example, and then the exercise was for us to draw floorplans of our own bedrooms.

Most of us were fine to work on our own, but there was this one girl in the class who simply didn't get the concept at all. The teacher spent the whole lesson squatting over this girl's shoulder - I think that the teacher ended up basically drawing most of the floorplan herself. And then the teacher had to constantly question another girl in the class - a friend of the 'slow' girl, who had visited the 'slow' girl's house many times - to clarify the layout of the girl's bedroom. So this second girl would've been constantly distracted from her work and probably finished a little behind, as well.

That worked out all well and good when there was only one girl in the class who needed all that special attention. But the teacher was working flat-out for the duration. What would've happened if there'd been 4 or 5 kids in the class who needed that level of special assistance? The lesson would've taken 4 or 5 times as long; and more likely then not, the other 25 kids would've been finished very quickly and spent the majority of the lesson just sitting around goofing off.

Of course, in the real world, in situations like this, it's normally the case the the 'slow' kids are just left to fall behind, rather then the majority of the class waiting for them to catch up.

[Neuroemergent]

Good post and question.

I'm grateful that there are some options for support "these days", that are more assessable.. 

Is there a link to the full video conversation?