Hello dear readers!
Long time no post! It is warm out, the sun is shining (okay, not right this minute, but in general) and the kids are basically dying to be on summer break. It feels like a good time to reflect on the past couple of months.
I have been thinking a great deal recently about motivation to change and grow. This was brought on by a student who told me about a month ago that he didn't "want to get better."
I won't go into detail as there are coworkers of mine who read this blog, but essentially this student has been struggling for some time to develop a more positive self-image. He makes some not-so-good choices and really beats himself up for it regularly. I asked him why he didn't want to get better, and he said that healing makes him feel scared. That the unknown and uncertainty of feeling better and more positive about himself was scarier than the reliable familiarity of feeling rock-bottom. We have talked, I have learned how to help build him up and how to help him calm down. But through it all, I have worried that we were getting nowhere. It felt like every time we took three steps forward, we took two back.
We have continued to talk. I have been something of a broken record, telling him to patiently await a feeling of confidence in his ability to manage feeling well. I have told him there would be no "ah-ha!" moment, but instead a slow growing feeling of comfort with self-confidence.
Recently he left me a note that said that he now wants to see life "from a new perspective." The note was a series of song lyrics I wasn't familiar with, and he explained that the point was that he wanted to find a way to see himself and his life from a positive angle. Essentially, that he now wanted to "get better," or was now motivated to change.
This was wonderful, but truly seemed to come out of nowhere. Not unlike inspiration, it is almost magical the way motivation can strike my students. Who will ever know what exactly got through or changed his mind or wormed its way into his subconscious and convinced him that positive self-image was his idea. It almost doesn't matter. At the end of the day, he has found his motivation, and it has come from within him. This is simultaneously the most rewarding and frustrating part of my experience in working with my students. I really succeed when they cease giving me credit and start adopting the skills I have taught as their own.
As often happens, I found comfort in muppets.
I was reminded this week of a recent Sesame Street clip featuring the undeniably perfect Janelle Monae. The clip is a song called The Power of Yet, and it is, perhaps obviously, about the power of the word "yet." We can change the entire meaning of a sentence with yet. "I can't do it," turns into "I can't do it yet." Through song and dance, Monae gives us a message we can easily pass on to our kids. And it's crucial in terms of maintaining any motivation in the work we do with our students, too. Just because my student was having a hard time feeling good about himself didn't ever mean he was doomed. It's all just a matter of "yet."
Our elementary special ed and speech staff put together a presentation of student work around the Power of Yet that was displayed to parents last night. It showed drawings of different activities students were not yet capable of doing, but above them were written encouraging sentences like "I can't multiply fractions yet," or "I can't rollerblade yet." I did a re-teach of the concept to a couple students yesterday, and you could tell by the way they talked about it that they were re-framing things they have always thought of as deficits.
I hope that you can remember that, even at the end of the year, there is still a lot of power in the word "yet." Our kids haven't mastered some of these skills yet, they haven't been consistently performing on tests yet. But there's still time, and all we can do is keep helping and watching and waiting for them to grow.
-Ms. OJ
