Lesson #1: "Take your time to respond"
I recently started working at a private school and majority of the students are male. When I started teaching there, I observed how the male students responded to my questions and comments during the class discussion. Most of them were quiet and very reserved and the boys were slower to respond to the emotional based questions. At first I thought, "oh, well this feeds into what I assumed about males in general, they process their information internally." Well, I realized something else was happening that I was not aware of. The boys were responding with silence because they have been taught to respond with silence. You see, typically when we teach boys about their emotions, we either tell them that they cannot express how they feel or we just don't talk about it at all. When the boys are asked to express how they feel, we get upset when they have nothing to say. It's absurd! I had to back track and create a lesson about emotions and communication. I used Poetry and Public Speaking as a way to teach it. Each day, I taught the boys how to recognize what they feel, how to respond to what they feel, how to relate to the way others feel. I also taught them how to control how they feel and how to express certain feelings to one another. I also focused on triggers and symptoms of our emotions. As time progressed, I began to notice that the boys would take their time to respond but they would respond. It was almost as if they were searching themselves first before they responded to the question or the scenario.
Take away:
Take your time to respond. Certain situations can be avoided if we take the time to think about the outcome of our decisions.
Blessings to you and all the best!
#singlemomchronicles
