“When I Was Little, I Used to Say GoldPish”

Toddler Q, the light of our life, is chatty. He’s been talking for over a year, but on a daily basis, we are amazed and delighted by his ability to articulate and to express himself.

Yesterday, on the way to his swimming lesson, AdventureMan was working with him on “goldfish” which he has been pronouncing “Goldpish.”

“Gold FISH!” they shouted as they drove down the road!

After his swimming lesson, on the way home, AdventureMan could hear him softly saying “goldfish.”

Then he said “BaBa, when I was little, I used to say ‘Goldpish.’ Now, I say ‘Goldfish!”

Mom Hugs; Babies Brains Get Bigger :-)

I saw this on one of the parenting posts on AOL and loved it. Hug your babies, yes, hug them and hug them again! Make their brains grow BIG and strong!

Women’s Rights a Threat to Society?

Society changes. Cable television has had a huge influence, travel to other countries changes perceptions, education gives a wider perspective, The genie is out of the bottle; women are equal people. No woman should need someone else’s permission to travel, work, or to use contraception.

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood: Women’s Rights Could Destroy Society, Countries Should ‘Reject And Condemn’ UN Declaration
Reuters | Posted: 03/14/2013 5:40 pm EDT

By Michelle Nichols

UNITED NATIONS, March 14 (Reuters) – Egypt’s ruling Muslim Brotherhood warns that a U.N. declaration on women’s rights could destroy society by allowing a woman to travel, work and use contraception without her husband’s approval and letting her control family spending.

The Islamist party of President Mohamed Mursi outlined 10 reasons why Muslim countries should “reject and condemn” the declaration, which the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women is racing to negotiate a consensus deal on by Friday.

The Brotherhood, which was elected to power in June, posted the statement on its website, http://www.ikhwanweb.com, on Thursday.

Egypt has joined Iran, Russia and the Vatican – dubbed an “unholy alliance” by some diplomats – in threatening to derail the women’s rights declaration by objecting to language on sexual, reproductive and gay rights.

The Muslim Brotherhood said the declaration would give “wives full rights to file legal complaints against husbands accusing them of rape or sexual harassment, obliging competent authorities to deal husbands punishments similar to those prescribed for raping or sexually harassing a stranger.”

U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice last week touted at the commission – a global policy-making body created in 1946 for the advancement of women – progress made by the United States in reducing the rate of violence against women by their partners.

“All 50 states in our union now have laws that treat date rape or spousal rape as just as much of a crime as rape by a stranger,” Rice said. “We cannot live in truly free societies, if women and girls are not free to reach their full potential.”

The contrasting views show the gap that needs to be breached in negotiations on the declaration, which this year is focused on urging an end to violence against women and girls. The commission failed to agree a declaration last year on a theme of empowering rural women due to similar disagreements.

WORLD IS WATCHING

Egypt has proposed an amendment, diplomats say, that would allow countries to avoid implementing the declaration if it clashed with national laws, religious or cultural values. But some diplomats say this would undermine the entire declaration.

The Muslim Brotherhood warned the declaration would give girls sexual freedom, legalize abortion, provide teenagers with contraceptives, give equality to women in marriage and require men and women to share duties such as child care and chores.

It said the declaration would allow “equal rights to homosexuals, and provide protection and respect for prostitutes” and “equal rights to adulterous wives and illegitimate sons resulting from adulterous relationships.”

A coalition of Arab human rights groups – from Egypt, Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, Jordan and Tunisia – called on countries at the Commission on the Status of Women on Thursday to stop using religion, culture, and tradition to justify abuse of women.

“The current positions taken by some Arab governments at this meeting is clearly not representative of civil society views, aspirations or best practices regarding the elimination and prevention of violence against women and girls within our countries,” said the statement issued by the Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies.

Michelle Bachelet, a former president of Chile and head of U.N. Women, which supports the commission, said the commission was unable to reach a deal a decade ago when it last focused on the theme of women’s rights and ending violence against women.

“Ten years later, we simply cannot allow disagreement or indecision to block progress for the world’s women,” Bachelet told the opening session of the commission last week. “The world is watching … the violence needs to stop.” (Editing by Mohammad Zargham)

Distracted Driving #1 Killer of U.S. Teens

Horrifying article. I would have thought they would be talking about texting, which we can see for ourselves has people, young and old, swerving all over the highway, but no – the culprit is PASSENGERS! The death rate for teens in cars increases with each additional passenger!

The papers are full of heartbreaking obituaries, young people, men and women, who had so much potential, so much life ahead of them, and now they are gone. Heartbroken parents think of the years of joy they will miss.

Fatal Distraction: Teen Drivers And Passengers Are A Deadly Mix

Studies show that one passenger in a teen driver’s car increases fatality risk by 44%, two passengers doubles the risk

Sharon Silke Carty
AOL Auto News

Teen driving safety is one of those problems that is easy to ignore: So often the tragedies are spread out throughout small towns around the country. One lost life here, two lost there. We don’t often piece all those crashes together and realize what’s happening to our children.

Sometimes to get change, you need a tipping point. Maybe this week will be it: Since Sunday, 15 teenagers have died in major car accidents around the U.S. Six died after crashing into a pond in Ohio. Five died when they crashed into a tanker truck in Texas. Four died when they crashed into a creek in Illinois.

And that’s just the crashes that were major and notable enough to make national news. One teen in Colorado died Sunday when the teen driver of a car he was in crashed into the side of a mobile home. Three died in Indiana when the drivers, in two trucks, ran stop signs and collided head-on. A 15-year-old driver in Maryland died when he was fleeing police in a car. And there are others, many which don’t make the news. Crashes that don’t end in fatalities but left serious damage: traumatic brain injuries, crippling spinal cord issues.

“The numbers are so small and spread out geographically,” said Timothy Hollister, a teen driving safety advocate in Connecticut whose book, “Not So Fast: Parenting Teen Drivers Before They Get Behind The Wheel”, comes out in September. “It’s only when you put the numbers together nationally that people even begin to take notice.”

Driving is the No. 1 killer of teens in this country, accounting for about 25 percent of teen deaths each year. About 3,000 to 5,000 teens die annually in car wrecks, enough to fill the halls of a large high school. Or two.

Recently, the Governor’s Highway Safety Association release preliminary figures for 2012 that show a troubling trend: After 10 years of declining, teen driving deaths are on the rise.

Although teen crashes seem random and unpredictable, they actually often follow a predictable pattern: It’s likely a group of teens heading nowhere in particular, probably late at night, and going fast. Often, they’re not wearing seatbelts.

Researchers have identified the dangerous habits of young drivers, who can’t ever be considered safe behind the wheel because they are simply too novice. There’s a common thread for many fatal crashes: More than one passenger in the car, especially if those passengers are male.

The Passenger Effect

A study released last year by AAA said passengers have a huge impact on fatalities: Fatality rates went up 44 percent with one passenger under 21 years old, doubled with two passengers, and quadruples when carrying three or more passengers who are under 21 years old.

Many graduated drivers license (GDL) laws regulate how many passengers teens can have in the car before they are awarded a full license. Parents who are concerned about their teens behind the wheel want to pay close attention to this rule: Make sure your teens are driving alone mostly, with no more than one passenger. Don’t let them carpool to and from school events. Don’t let them head out for the evening with a bunch of other kids teens in one car. Remember that other passengers are a huge distraction that can turn into a fatal distraction.

Laws regarding passengers in vehicles driven by teens are “the single least enforced and most ignored rule,” Hollister said. “It’s the one piece that could make a difference. That’s parents putting convenience ahead of safety, and not understanding the dangers that every passenger in a teen driver’s car adds an additional risk.”

New Study Shows Taking Folic Acid Cuts Autism Risk 40%

I heard this yesterday on NPR and found this article today on the Huffpost/AOL News. The critical factor is that a woman needs to be taking folic acid supplements BEFORE she gets pregnant:

With autism now affecting one in 88 children in the U.S., many parents are searching for any step they can take to help lower their child’s risk of developing the disorder. A new Norwegian study joins a small but growing body of research that suggests a simple, low-cost option already exists: Taking folic acid during the earliest stages of pregnancy could lower a child’s odds of developing autism by nearly 40 percent.

“This is a relatively inexpensive way that parents can take action to possibly prevent risk of tube birth defects and autism,” Alycia Halladay, senior director for environmental and clinical Sciences for the advocacy group Autism Speaks, told The Huffington Post. Halladay did not work on the new study, which was published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Tuesday.

Researchers analyzed a sample of more than 85,000 children born in Norway between 2002 and 2008 to study the effect of taking a folic acid supplement — typically between 200 and 400 micrograms per day — from one month before a woman got pregnant to two months after. Some .10 percent of children whose moms took folic acid supplements were diagnosed with autism, compared to .21 percent of those whose moms did not — which is equal to 39 percent lower odds.

The study does not establish a cause and effect relationship between the vitamin and subsequent autism, and its authors do not know why folic acid may have a protective effect. Study researcher Pal Suren of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health told HuffPost that folic acid is critical to the synthesis of DNA, which could play some role in the connection. Folic acid may also affect how certain genes are turned on and off in the body, he hypothesized, saying it was “not biologically implausible” that folic acid supplementation has certain epigenetic effects.

The new study also raises questions about how much folic acid may be needed to lower autism risk, as well as what form it must come in.

“We do not know how other dosages would have affected the risk of autism, or whether it matters if folic acid is taken as single tablets or as part of a prenatal multivitamin supplement,” Suren said.

The researchers took steps to ensure that the decreased risk was not just because women who took folic acid were also engaged in other healthy behaviors. To control for that, they looked at fish oil use (assuming women who took fish oil were also likely to be healthy in other ways) and found no link between lower autism risk.

Since the early 1990s, groups like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Public Health Service have recommended that all women of childbearing age take 400 micrograms of folic acid daily to help prevent neural tube defects — birth defects of the brain and spinal cord including spina bifida and anencephaly. Since folic acid was added to the grain supply in 1998, the U.S. has seen a 26 percent decrease in those neural tube disorders, according to figures compiled by the March of Dimes.

The possibility of a link between folic acid consumption and lower autism risk is far more preliminary. A 2011, California-based study in the journal Epidemiology found that mothers of children with autism were less likely to have taken a prenatal vitamin in the three months before pregnancy or in the first month after getting pregnant, suggesting that so-called “periconceptional” use of prenatal vitamins may reduce autism risk. In the U.S., prenatal vitamins typically include between 400 and 800 micrograms of folic acid.

But folic acid is by no means a magic pill, experts caution. The fact that rates of autism diagnosis have skyrocketed in the past several decades despite more and more women taking folic acid shows how complex the origins of autism are. The exact causes of the disorder, which is characterized by social and communication difficulties and repetitive behaviors, are still unknown.

“This is one way that risk may be reduced, but this isn’t the only way,” said Halladay. “It’s an inexpensive way to potentially reduce the risk of autism, but there are a number of risk factors — genetics and other environmental factors — that solidly contribute to risk.”

Karen Thompson Walker and The Age of Miracles

The Age of Miracles is a very odd name for this book, which starts off in a beautiful little coastal town in California, a very normal, modern town, and then everything changes. Suddenly, the earth’s rotation is slowing, incrementally, but resulting in longer and longer days and longer and longer nights. The difference is small at first, but grows.

Julia is in sixth grade, a painful time anyway in most lives where your body suddenly changes and all your relationships with all your friends change, and boys become a major factor. Imagine. All this AND the earth’s rotation is slowing.

No one knows what to expect. No one knows why or how the rotational slowing is happening, and no one has a clue how to fix it. Do you stay on a 24 hour clock, as the days grow to 30 hours? Forty hours? Can you even function in a forty hour day, or sleep a 40 hour night? How do you stay on a 24 hour clock and force yourself to sleep when the sun is shining brightly overhead? How do you have a school day entirely in the middle of the darkest part of the night? How does food continue to grow? What impact does this have on birds? Migrations? How does kicking a soccer ball feel when earth’s gravitational field starts to lessen?

The author does a brilliant job in a what-if situation, and manages to make it quite real. Don’t read this book if you are the suggestible type – it’s just one more thing you’ll start worrying about when you don’t need to. If you can read speculative fiction without letting it influence you, then by all means read this book, it is a good read.

The Death of Bees by Lisa O’Donnell

Death of Bees was another powerful recommendation by National Public Radio.

I believe in a greater power, in a God who sends things my way and that I am meant to be paying attention. Several books have been recommended to me lately which I didn’t choose, or might have avoided had I known how painfully they dealt with poor parenting and children in the depths of horrific poverty.

Here is what the lead into the book says:

Today Is Christmas Eve,
Today is my birthday,
Today I am fifteen,
Today I buried my parents
in the back yard.
Neither of them were beloved.

Oh my goodness! I am sucked in immediately. And immediately I am overcome by the grinding nature of poverty, the enormous amount of energy it takes just to be fed, to have a roof over your head, to function in the bureaucracy that seeks to ameliorate the burdens of poverty.

I am horrified by the lives of innocent children in the hands of people who should never have responsibility for anyone, even themselves, their decision making skills are so non-existent. There are parents who have no idea what self-sacrifice GOOD parenting requires, who raise children who are often trying to survive their own parents.

The Death of Bees has redemption. It has two sisters who love one another and are smarter than the average child. It has a neighbor who notices, not in a snoopy or intrusive way, but in a kind, helping and ultimately sacrificial way. It has moments of black humor, when the neighbor’s dog keeps digging at the parental graves in the backyard and bringing bones inside just at the worst moments.

Ultimately, it is a tale of survival, in spite of the parents, in spite of the system, in spite of betrayals by family and friends. There is a glimmer of hope that life may be different for these sisters, if they can survive their upbringing and overcome their childhood.

Now, go read the book

Changing Face of the Worlds Families

I excerpted this report from the Huffington Post; the story was focused on Canada and I edited to focus on family trends. You can read the entire article by clicking here.

I had always assumed a two parent family provided the best support for a child. It never occurred to me there may be situations where the single-parent model could focus more resources on the child . . . It doesn’t matter what we believe; the face of families around the world is changing, and we will need to be dealing with the realities.

Marriage is a struggle. Raising children is a struggle. The more help, the better, I think!

The structure of families is changing worldwide, and based on a new report, some children are better off living with one parent than two.

According to the 2013 World Family Map report by non-profit research centre Child Trends, children living in two-parent families did better in school in higher-income countries, but children in lower-income regions did better with one parent.

“In some single parenting examples, resources were controlled by the mother of the household, ensuring these resources went to the well-being of children,” says Laura Lippman, senior program area director, education, and co-investigator of the World Family Map. “It suggests that some single-parent families may not benefit from a second parent who might be taking these resources away.”

Using 10 different data sources and partnering with universities around the world, Child Trends looked at the well-being of families in both low-income and high-income countries and the outcome on their children’s education. Based on the research, two-parent families are becoming less common, marriage rates are falling and a majority of children under 17 still live at home.

Significant Statistics From The Study

Two Parents vs. Single Parent:
DID YOU KNOW? Children in Asia and the Middle East under the age of 18 are more likely to live in two-parent families, compared to other regions in the world. Also, children are more likely to live with one or no parent in the Americas, Europe, Oceania, and Sub-Saharan Africa than other regions, according to the report.

Extended Family:
DID YOU KNOW? Living with extended family, which includes parents and other relatives outside the immediate family, is more common in Asia, the Middle East, South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and not any other part of the world.

Marriage:
DID YOU KNOW? Marriage rates are declining in many regions. Adults are most likely to be married in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Childbearing:
DID YOU KNOW? Childbearing rates are also declining, according to the report. The highest fertility rates are in Sub-Saharan Africa — a woman in Nigeria gives birth to an average of 5.5 children.

Living Together:
DID YOU KNOW? There have also been dramatic increases in cohabitation, divorce, and non-marital childbearing in the Americas, Europe, and Oceania over the last four decades, according to the report.

Population:
DID YOU KNOW? In the Americas and Oceania countries, women in these regions were having enough children for the population to replace itself from one generation to the next, or were slightly below these “replacement levels,” according to the report.

Non-Martial Childbearing:
DID YOU KNOW? In South America, over half of all children were born to unmarried mothers — Colombia had the highest rate at 85 per cent.

Poverty:
DID YOU KNOW? The report also looked extensively at rates of children and absolute poverty around the world. Absolute poverty was measured as the percentage of the population living below $1.25 a day. The report found Nigeria had the highest absolute poverty rate at 64 per cent.

Employment:
DID YOU KNOW? Between 45 and 97 per cent of parents polled were employed worldwide, and the highest employment rate was in Asia.

Family Life:
DID YOU KNOW? Between 31 per cent (in Russia) and 74 per cent (in Chile) of adults around the world are completely or very satisfied with their family life.

Household Work:
DID YOU KNOW? Approximately 55 per cent of couples in Russia and 88 per cent of couples in Philippines reported low levels of disagreement around household work.

Eating Together:
DID YOU KNOW? In Italy, 94 per cent of 15-year-old kids eat meals with their families regularly.

Family Structure:
DID YOU KNOW? In a majority of countries polled, respondents felt children were more likely to flourish in a home with a mother and a father. However, in Sweden, only 47 per cent of adults shared this belief compared to 99 per cent in Egypt, suggesting to World Family Map surveyors a more liberal attitude to changing family structures in certain countries.

Horrifying Parenting

After our boat trip, we took a walk to the diving platform to watch the manatees. When we lived in the Tampa/St. Pete/Safety Harbor area, we saw Manatees all the time, and it was heart breaking. They are big, stupid, clumsy animals who do no harm. They love to congregate where there is warm water on a cold winter’s night. Sadly, these slow moving sea cows are often hit and damaged by boaters; the blades of the motors scarring the manatees, often wounding them fatally. They have no defense against the casual, callous cruelty of the oblivious boater.

Here, in Wakulla Springs, they are safe. The only boats allowed in the Springs areas have caged blades; they cannot hurt the manatees.

No, only people can hurt them.

As we were watching the manatee, there was a family there. I try not to judge parents; parenting is hard. I will just make some observations. It was 40 degrees F – not that far from freezing – and the two little girls were dressed in beach clothes and their feet were bare. They were running on the diving platform, while Mom was trying to take photos of the manatees with her iPhone, and dad was trying to keep the little ones rounded up. On the second level, two stories above the ground, one little girl, maybe four years old, runs out to the edge of the diving platform and her dad snatches her back, just in time, as mom continues trying to film the manatees. All this is their business, although I fear for little girls who are raised carelessly, it is not my business.

Then, the older little girl reached down in her pockets and pulled out handsfull of breadcrumbs, which she spread into the water WHILE HER PARENTS WATCHED. Did you not see the signs? Did you not hear the guides? We are not to feed the manatees anything! Bread and breadcrumbs are not a part of their diet! Parents, what are you using for brains? ? ?

No. I did not say anything; I don’t look for trouble. I write it in this blog, and then, God willing, I let it go.

Teachers’ Expectations Evoke Life-Changing Achievement

Yes, this is a long article from National Public Radio, but it’s important. I want you to read it, and if you have the time, go to the website – you can click on the blue type above – and listen to it yourself, because it is life changing for us, and for how we treat our children, too.

Do it at a time when you have time to listen. It caught me by surprise, but I was so enthralled, I stayed for the entire segment. Children with the greatest challenges can succeed, if they are nurtured and mentored. Any child can be a success; there are no losers. This is powerful stuff.

by ALIX SPIEGEL
In my Morning Edition story today, I look at expectations — specifically, how teacher expectations can affect the performance of the children they teach.

The first psychologist to systematically study this was a Harvard professor named Robert Rosenthal, who in 1964 did a wonderful experiment at an elementary school south of San Francisco.

The idea was to figure out what would happen if teachers were told that certain kids in their class were destined to succeed, so Rosenthal took a normal IQ test and dressed it up as a different test.

“It was a standardized IQ test, Flanagan’s Test of General Ability,” he says. “But the cover we put on it, we had printed on every test booklet, said ‘Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition.’ “

Rosenthal told the teachers that this very special test from Harvard had the very special ability to predict which kids were about to be very special — that is, which kids were about to experience a dramatic growth in their IQ.

After the kids took the test, he then chose from every class several children totally at random. There was nothing at all to distinguish these kids from the other kids, but he told their teachers that the test predicted the kids were on the verge of an intense intellectual bloom.

As he followed the children over the next two years, Rosenthal discovered that the teachers’ expectations of these kids really did affect the students. “If teachers had been led to expect greater gains in IQ, then increasingly, those kids gained more IQ,” he says.

But just how do expectations influence IQ?

As Rosenthal did more research, he found that expectations affect teachers’ moment-to-moment interactions with the children they teach in a thousand almost invisible ways. Teachers give the students that they expect to succeed more time to answer questions, more specific feedback, and more approval: They consistently touch, nod and smile at those kids more.

“It’s not magic, it’s not mental telepathy,” Rosenthal says. “It’s very likely these thousands of different ways of treating people in small ways every day.”

So since expectations can change the performance of kids, how do we get teachers to have the right expectations? Is it possible to change bad expectations? That was the question that brought me to the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, where I met Robert Pianta.

Pianta, dean of the Curry School, has studied teachers for years, and one of the first things he told me when we sat down together was that it is truly hard for teachers to control their expectations.

“It’s really tough for anybody to police their own beliefs,” he said. “But think about being in a classroom with 25 kids. The demands on their thinking are so great.”

Still, people have tried. The traditional way, Pianta says, has been to sit teachers down and try to change their expectations through talking to them.

“For the most part, we’ve tried to convince them that the beliefs they have are wrong,” he says. “And we’ve done most of that convincing using information.”

But Pianta has a different idea of how to go about changing teachers’ expectations. He says it’s not effective to try to change their thoughts; the key is to train teachers in an entirely new set of behaviors.

For years, Pianta and his colleagues at the Curry School have been collecting videotapes of teachers teaching. By analyzing these videos in minute ways, they’ve developed a good idea of which teaching behaviors are most effective. They can also see, Pianta tells me, how teacher expectations affect both their behaviors and classroom dynamics.

Pianta gives one very specific example: the belief that boys are disruptive and need to be managed.

“Say I’m a teacher and I ask a question in class, and a boy jumps up, sort of vociferously … ‘I know the answer! I know the answer! I know the answer!’ ” Pianta says.

“If I believe boys are disruptive and my job is control the classroom, then I’m going to respond with, ‘Johnny! You’re out of line here! We need you to sit down right now.’ “

This, Pianta says, will likely make the boy frustrated and emotionally disengaged. He will then be likely to escalate his behavior, which will simply confirm the teacher’s beliefs about him, and the teacher and kid are stuck in an unproductive loop.

But if the teacher doesn’t carry those beliefs into the classroom, then the teacher is unlikely to see that behavior as threatening.

Instead it’s: ” ‘Johnny, tell me more about what you think is going on … But also, I want you to sit down quietly now as you tell that to me,’ ” Pianta says.

“Those two responses,” he says, “are dictated almost entirely by two different interpretations of the same behavior that are driven by two different sets of beliefs.”

To see if teachers’ beliefs would be changed by giving them a new set of teaching behaviors, Pianta and his colleagues recently did a study.

They took a group of teachers, assessed their beliefs about children, then gave a portion of them a standard pedagogy course, which included information about appropriate beliefs and expectations. Another portion got intense behavioral training, which taught them a whole new set of skills based on those appropriate beliefs and expectations.

For this training, the teachers videotaped their classes over a period of months and worked with personal coaches who watched those videos, then gave them recommendations about different behaviors to try.

After that intensive training, Pianta and his colleagues analyzed the beliefs of the teachers again. What he found was that the beliefs of the trained teachers had shifted way more than the beliefs of teachers given a standard informational course.

This is why Pianta thinks that to change beliefs, the best thing to do is change behaviors.

“It’s far more powerful to work from the outside in than the inside out if you want to change expectations,” he says.

In other words, if you want to change a mind, simply talking to it might not be enough.

7 Ways Teachers Can Change Their Expectations

Researcher Robert Pianta offered these suggestions for teachers who want to change their behavior toward problem students:

Watch how each student interacts. How do they prefer to engage? What do they seem to like to do? Observe so you can understand all they are capable of.

Listen. Try to understand what motivates them, what their goals are and how they view you, their classmates and the activities you assign them.

Engage. Talk with students about their individual interests. Don’t offer advice or opinions – just listen.

Experiment: Change how you react to challenging behaviors. Rather than responding quickly in the moment, take a breath. Realize that their behavior might just be a way of reaching out to you.

Meet: Each week, spend time with students outside of your role as “teacher.” Let the students choose a game or other nonacademic activity they’d like to do with you. Your job is to NOT teach but watch, listen and narrate what you see, focusing on students’ interests and what they do well. This type of activity is really important for students with whom you often feel in conflict or who you avoid.

Reach out: Know what your students like to do outside of school. Make it a project for them to tell you about it using some medium in which they feel comfortable: music, video, writing, etc. Find both individual and group time for them to share this with you. Watch and listen to how skilled, motivated and interested they can be. Now think about school through their eyes.

Reflect: Think back on your own best and worst teachers, bosses or supervisors. List five words for each that describe how you felt in your interactions with them. How did the best and the worst make you feel? What specifically did they do or say that made you feel that way? Now think about how your students would describe you. Jot down how they might describe you and why. How do your expectations or beliefs shape how they look at you? Are there parallels in your beliefs and their responses to you?