how to quite teachers from getting angry
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Answer:
One of those days…
You know the kind.
It’s your first year teaching, (or 21st).
Your stellar lesson plan is tanking, the one you spent 6 hours perfecting.
You were not prepared for how many different ways 23 children could interpret a one-step direction.
You were not prepared for how quickly 23 packages of markers would turn into 276 loose markers intermittently falling on the floor.
You were not prepared for how quickly the collective voices of 23 children could achieve decibels beyond noise ordinance allowances. And you had no idea Mr. Zabowski, assistant principal, would just happen to walk by at the height of your classroom chaos.
You try to keep a brave face, but inside you’re stewing. You are angry with your students’ behaviors and embarrassed Mr. Zabowski witnessed all of it.
Your first inclination is to give an old fashioned scolding, but that is not the teacher you want to be!
However, with each passing minute students are getting louder and less focused. You take a deep calming breath, but then see Max putting crackers in the aquarium.
That does it. You go ahead and give your class an old-school scolding.
You hear loud, angry words come out of your mouth. You want to put on the breaks, calm down, get your soothing teacher voice back. But you just can’t shake the anger now radiating from your mouth, face, and body.
Eventually you sort things out and the kids get rolling. But you are crestfallen, disappointed in yourself. You want to be the calm and kind, firm but fair teacher you read about in your classroom behavior management books.
Finally, the last bell rings and the last child saunters out the door. Your anger has dissipated.
In fact, now calm, three perfectly reasonable strategies pop into your brain for how you could have quickly adapted the failed lesson plan and skipped the angry lecture.
Why couldn’t you have managed your anger better and called up alternative strategies in the moment?
What is wrong with you?
Should you even be a teacher?
The above kind of situation, after happening once too often, turned me into a serial psychology textbook reader because I believed my anger was caused by my own inadequacies as a person. And clearly the person I was needed work.
Unfortunately, the thing about psychology is this. It is not a science of hope. It is all gloom and doom and analyzes human behaviors from the point of view of inadequacy.
Psychologists lays out our so-called ‘psychology’ as hyper prone to such inadequacies as disorder, deficit, despair, defiance, opposition, withdrawal, depression, esteem issues, obsession, paranoia, anger, anxiety, violence, narcissism, addiction, and out of control emotions unless one does everything in one’s power to battle against these tendencies and dysfunctions. In fact, the main take away from psychological theories is that our alleged ‘psychological’ characteristics are out to get us, not to help us.