Emotional Supports Make a Difference

 

Emotional Supports Make a Difference

There have been so many times that I have read a headline to a news story, or read the plot line of movie, or seen an advertisement referring to the problem of mental health in our society.  We are bombarded with suggestions on what to do and how to help a friend, or a colleague, or a member of our family who is in distress.  The problem is that so many people find it very difficult to be empathetic enough to sense how life must look through the eyes of the other person. 

Funny enough, I just read a book of commentary on the book of Genesis and the argument was being advanced was that the book of Genesis focusses on a very dysfunctional multi-generation family and the author follows the characters as their sense of morality and justice evolves over time.  He does this though by looking at the events in the story through the eyes of the various figures in the biblical stories.  For example, so many of us have read the stories of the wives of Jacob and the births of his twelve sons and single daughter and jumped to conclusions about what was going on. But how often has anyone really spent time looking at the plot line as it must have appeared to Leah when she was passed over by Jacob in favour of Rachel or how the sons of the two handmaidens thought of their father and how he favoured Rachel's son Joseph.  Another book made a very convincing case that everything in that part of Genesis happened because Jacob treated Joseph as if he were the only real son and so he thought of him as the natural inheritor.  We many of us know how that dysfunction turned out.

Now think about what might have been if Joseph had been one of our students or we had taught in a school with Leah.  WE don't often think about the world through the eyes of our colleagues or our students, but good teachers or those aspiring to make a difference, have to be able to do that. I taught my students when I was a teacher educator that empathy was one of the most important dispositions to possess when seeking to make a career of teaching.  Without it, we cannot reach our students emotionally which is where everything begins.  If a child is hurting in any way, he or she won't think about the lessons being taught.  If our minds are clouded by problems we encounter outside of school, we cannot focus on what we need to do.  

The truth of it is that someone with empathy can sense when another person is hurting, from body language or lack of eye contact or just in the way he or she reacts to things.  That is where we begin to really be a teacher or a colleague...........sensing someone else's pain and trying to help in even small ways.  There is a difference between meddling and figuring out ways to offer a hand without someone else sensing there is an ulterior motive.  The sweet spot is finding out how to do that, but we can't do that unless we set about to be better at empathy.  

The rabbis teach that acts of loving kindness, and that is where empathy comes from, is one of the three pillars of our lives on this earth.  The other two are the Torah or the law, stemming from The Ten Commandments and the prayer showing our understanding and acceptance that life does not evolve around us.  Humility and empathy are what we need to help those around us.  

BEYOND A TOOL FOR MEETINGS

 

I don’t often have a reason to use the same topic for both of the blogs that I have been keeping for a while now.  However, it just occurred to me as I was thinking about what I was going to write about this week, that what seemed appropriate for one blog was also appropriate for the other. So here it goes.

 

In the Jewish religion, as most of you will know, our Sabbath begins on Friday at sundown and ends at sundown on Saturday.  It is our tradition to symbolize the end of the Shabbat by the recitation of a service called Havdalah.  In Hebrew, “LeHavdil” is the Hebrew verb for to make a difference, as to distinguish one thing from another. Havdalah signifies the difference between the holiness of the Shabbat and the mundane or profane things that mark the rest of the week. We light a special candle, smell incense representing the sweetness of the Shabbat, the day of rest, and say the Kiddush or blessing over the wine which represents sanctity.  Oftentimes, this is a ceremony which is a cause for gathering of the extended family or a group of friends.  There is food to eat, singing and dancing.  We have come to call this a Kumsitz, which means almost how it sounds.  Come and Sit. 

 

This past Shabbat evening, the cantors and rabbis from the vast majority of the synagogues in Toronto and some from outside the city, like St. Catharines, had a virtual kumsitz using Zoom.  I know you are going to wonder about the food and drink and dancing, and, of course, there was none of that. But there were almost 400 computers linked together and we all enjoyed a program of singing by the cantors, some speeches from several of the rabbis, and lots of messages sent back and forth across the netherspace.  

 

Everyone thoroughly enjoyed this Zoom-facilitated program indicated not just by the messaging but also the fact that almost everyone of those 400 computers were still online after over two hours of camaraderie.  When I was young enough to still go to camp, we often had such a kumsitz but around the campfire and we’d sit and sing and dance for hours.  It was all very extemporaneous and casual.  And that’s the point of my blog post today.  This age of the Pandemic has been marked by attempts to keep alive a spirit of community and togetherness despite lockdowns and limits to visiting and so forth.  

 

Zoom is only one virtual tool but anyone who thinks that it cannot be used to facilitate collaboration and community is not thinking out of the box enough.  It’s very true that there were technical problems and people complaining at the beginning but that’s because it was so very much an experiment.  But once everyone got beyond the technology, that was the end of it.  

 

Zoom can be used for so much more than meetings.  WE used Zoom very successfully at the synagogue for our annual meeting and we even managed to have voting online and overcome handicaps with that.  There is no end to the ways Zoom can be used once you start to think about it.  It can be used for birthday parties, for meetings, for concerts, for book talks (something we are going to participate in tonight), for presentations of all kinds.  And, the best part, it seems to me, is that it is fairly easy to get to figure out how to use.  The only major real drawback right now is that the bandwidth needed to carry that many signals distributed across a wide area is not so far able to keep up with how we want to use it. But, I am sure that, given time, Zoom will evolve along with the bandwidth.  HAVE NO FEAR!

Career Education Is a Years’ Long Process

 

When I was a teenager, I remember my mother made it her business to enable us to be tested for our abilities and interests.  When I look back it, I suspect it was because I had expressed great confusion about what I wanted to do after high school. My father had said that if I wanted to work in the store, he would take a gun and shoot himself.  My grandparents insisted that being a rabbi was no job for a good Jewish boy. My dad wanted me to be a doctor and that was the end of it. He wouldn’t even allow me to drop Latin even though I was failing in it because he insisted that I needed Latin to get into Medical School and I told him I was not going there. We had a huge fight in the guidance counsellor’s office over that one.  My maternal grandfather insisted that I needed to be a lawyer. So, we went into Toronto and I was subjected to a whack of tests and I can’t even remember if anything ever came of it.  

 

The long and short of it is that I understand full well how important career education is. I taught at a time when it was assumed that there should be classes devoted to career education, with students wrestling with jobs and professions and so forth. When I was a teacher, still, I organized open houses for career exploration, bringing in friends and volunteers from the parent cohort, to talk to students about their jobs and allow students to ask questions about what was involved and what was needed and so forth.  

 

I was never convinced that this was the way to inject thinking about careers and future destinations into classroom programming. So when we began to advocate for career education being part of ongoing conversations, I was all for it.  So we had to try and have programming experiences that exposed students to outdoor education, to university explorations, to responding to stories about teachers or doctors or pharmacists with discussions about those particular careers or professions.  It was not long before we talked about outcomes concerning Career Education being embedded into every grade and every subject.  

 

If we took students to Black Creek Pioneer Village, making sure we drew attention to the farmers and the cooks and what their days might have been like and what kinds of people would find satisfaction in those roles.  Or while conducting science experiments in laboratories set up for that purpose, to talk about what skills scientists need to possess and what education would be required today and is there anyone amongst you who might enjoy something like that?

 

So when I read about special initiatives or software inventories or guest speakers as one shot deals, I shake my heads and realize that career education is something that is part and parcel with knowing our students and helping them come to understand themselves and what they might or might not like and learning how to set goals for oneself and work towards them. That, in the end, is the only way Career Education will achieve what it needs to achieve.

Soft Skills and Emotional Intelligence

 

During the Christmas holidays, I read about a study done by LinkedIn concerning the skills most often required above all else by prospective employers.  According to the report I read, technology knowledge and use were highly prized for sure However what was most prized were what has come to be known as soft skills, the interpersonal skills that enable someone to meet and greet and talk to just about anyone.  The skills which I have often elsewhere referred to as social and emotional intelligence or what some refer to as empathy.

 

I used to tell my students in the Niagara University Teacher Education Program, one of the skills they needed in order to be effective was empathy, being able to understand their students and see the world through their eyes. That is what comes from social and emotional intelligence. We all know what it feels like to be in communication with someone who is not really interested in what we are doing or what we have to say.  Take that to the business level or the educational level and you get to understand what the problem is and how to solve it.  

 

One of the crucial ways in which we can help our students develop stronger social and emotional intelligence or soft skills is to organize activities that require them to collaborate together over shorter or longer periods of time.  Children don’t learn how to work together naturally.  Collaboration does not come automatically. That is why only children often find it hard to adjust at first to school. They have never had to share, or negotiate with someone else for what they want or to give ground in order to keep peace in a family or anything like of that nature.  

 

I can hear all kinds of professional educators complaining about the issues surrounding group work. That is what we used to call it. It is always easier to give students tasks and make it up to them alone to complete and then talk to those that stay off task. But it is far more natural for groups to discipline each other and to learn how to assign tasks according to the strengths of the members of a group.  Collaboration inadvertently forces young people to look at each other differently, as partners rather than competitors

 

We all know sports teams that are dominated by star players who still don’t achieve much because the stars have not learned how to share their glory.  Or people who refuse certain tasks because they think they are beneath them.  If you start to think about situations like that, and what teamwork looks like on the ice, on the court, on the field, and so forth, you begin to understand why soft skills are so important. 

 

Looking at this from an entirely different perspective, think about how Winston Churchill mobilized the collective identity of the British people in World War II and what is happening in the United States right now.  In the former, the English people knew instinctively that they were in it together, but in the latter, one half of the country does not trust the other half and so little to nothing can be accomplished.

 

There are more than a couple of ways to help children learn soft skills, but they must be taught or cultivated, even if you start small.  It is up to the adults in the room, in the school, in the family, in the nation to structure things in such a way that people see it is in their best interests to work together and the more they do, the better they become at it.  The technology today only enables us to collaborate in different ways and wise is the educator or parent who sees how that can be made to happen.  If we want to make things better in our world, the only way it will happen is when we all band together to work towards a common goal.  I am sure you can think of what some of those common goals are.