A Swift Kick to the Emotional Groin

Author’s Note: This is a reprint from a few years ago, before I was writing on Substack. I believe it was published on FB, and not elsewhere. I’ve returned to it often over the years, because it conveys something underlying learning and life that speaks to my heart.

A child walked out of my class yesterday.

He's learning to read, and he became angry and frustrated because the lesson was hard.

I've come to recognize something in these moments - humans tend to get frustrated when they don't understand something. Children often encounter this when learning new tasks - like reading. Teachers have an opportunity to up the ante by responding with their own anger. I believe this is why we have a view of teachers as sometimes or often angry. What are they angry at? The kids? I don't think so. I think they are angry because they don't understand something, which is - how do I help this child learn?

It's a different task. The student is learning to read. The teacher is learning to teach. Both encounter difficulty, and experience anger.

I'm not sure why we get angry in these situations. I suspect there's an evolutionary root to this behavior, because there's no reason to think this is the only strategy. Nevertheless, it appears to be deeply rooted in our psyches.

This insight helps me as a teacher, and as a parent. I am often engaged in tasks that I know full well how to do and involve zero stress for me - like reading. But I don't always know how to pass that skill or information on. And that leads to internal frustration.

We're just humans doing human stuff.

Now, frustration presents differently in different people - anger in some, withdrawal in others, sadness, self-doubt, or a variety of other feelings and actions. Underneath it all, I think, is an underlying inability to accomplish some task - be it academic, social, or merely putting food in your mouth. Have you ever seen a baby try to perform a movement, fail, then cry and get surprisingly frustrated? Very natural. But it appears humorous (or obnoxious) to those of us who have no trouble directing our hands to our mouths.

Learning is hard.

So when this child walked out, I was faced with a situation. My nerves were boiling. Why? Because I don't know what I'm doing! And this triggers anger. When I take a good look at myself, I find I have no anger at this child for having difficulty reading. Learning to read is hard. There's nothing strange about that. It's my internal orientation to his lack of learning - particularly as a teacher - that is the real cause of my frustration.

But here's where it gets tricky. Once we have them, it's easy to fling bad feelings at one another, just like it's easy to fling the good ones. This child and I had all the opportunity in the world to do that. The barrel was loaded. The match was lit.

I recognized that if I let my anger get a hold of me, we'd have a much worse situation on our hands. That's why this internal insight helps me, because I was able to soothe myself and my student at the same time. We had the same problem!

I stopped him, not with a, "Get right back here, mister," but with a, "Hey. Look. This stuff is hard... That's just how it is. And when things are hard, we get frustrated. That's normal. I do the same thing. No big deal, really." And I wasn't lying. I meant it. He could hear it in the tone of my voice as much as the words in the air. I sympathized with him - because I was facing the same situation. I was angry because I was trying to do something, and it didn't work.

As soon as I sympathized with him, he turned a corner. It took a moment to blow off that steam. Those brain chemicals need a certain amount of time to degrade - but it's only a matter of seconds or minutes to resynthesize them into something else. That's how quickly our bodies can negotiate these realms. But we all know what it's like to be angry for days - by cycling and recycling the negative thoughts that produce that brain chemistry. Whew!

I did one last thing. I told this child that he was welcome to just chill in the classroom. We have several outlets that are quiet and easy to engage with - textures, colors, shapes. I asked him to be quiet so I could continue working with the others. "But I have one rule," I said, knowing that we had salvaged the emotional bond between us. "You are not allowed to read that sentence."

It took him about 30 seconds to divert the energy of his frustration into the challenge of that statement. Five minutes later he had solved the riddle, read the sentence, and was smiling with his classmates.

And guess what happened to me? My heart slowed down. I synthesized those brain chemicals too. No anger left, just pride.

This is what teaching is for me – a swift kick in the emotional groin.