Joining Adam Salgat is Mike Desparrois and one of the newest team members, Micki Gibbs. The three of them discuss logic and emotion in the classroom. They talk about what it’s like for students and teachers. Listen closely to find the little tidbits that will help you work with your student or your child.
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Introduction 0:07
Welcome to the listen first podcast brought to you by the Chapman foundation for caring communities. Our vision and mission is to strengthen relationships and build stronger communities through listening, leadership, care and service to create a truly human connection. Learn and partner with us as we imagine a society in which people care about each other. And listen first.
Adam Salgat 0:35
Welcome to the listen first podcast. My name is Adam Salgat. Joining me today is Magnus Barris and one of our newest team members, Mickey Gibbs, the three of us discuss logic and emotion in the classroom. We talk about what it’s like for students, and what it’s like for teachers. Listen close to find the little tidbits that will help you work with your student or your own child. Welcome back to the podcast. We have two guests with us today, one of which is often here, Mike, this parents how are you doing today, Mike?
Speaker 3 1:13
I am doing wonderful Adam really excited for today’s topic, can’t wait to jump into it. But you know what I’m even more excited for ones that are excited to introduce our newest employee and teammate Mickey Gibbs, Mickey comes from the great state of Michigan, she will be our strategic engagement leader there. But what’s awesome about Mickey as well, she’s a fellow educator. Her focus has been on early education, which is near and dear to my heart, because my wife is also an early childhood educator. So I get to hear a lot about that. And I always say our early childhood educators are the most important. And I know that’s a tough thing to hear. But there’s a foundational piece, right? That’s the stage for everything else to happen. And Mickey is also just exceptional in working with our parent groups as well. So not only is Mickey the newest, one of our newest employees at CFCC. But she has also been a facilitator with us for the past five years as well. So she’s had a lot of opportunity to work inside our organization as well. And she’s done a number of parent podcasts and snippets that I know other people have seen. But this right here today out of his her very first podcast. So welcome, Nikki, we’re glad to have you today.
Unknown Speaker 2:22
Thank you. I’m very glad to be here.
Adam Salgat 2:25
Mickey, is there anything else you’d like to let us know about your experience and your career? You know, set the table a little bit on who you are and everything you’ve done?
Speaker 1 2:33
Sure, I’ve been working in education for over 20 years, I’ve served as a classroom teacher, I’ve served in organizational leadership. And most recently, I’ve served the entire system at the county level. So I’ve had a lot of different experiences with children and parents and organizational leads that really help us get to a point where we can help change the system for better for educators and for parents.
Adam Salgat 3:03
Mickey I saw you speak at a it’s called wake up Midland, it’s a local Midland Business Alliance. Here in Michigan that I saw you speak up probably, it was before I knew you before I knew you through the Chapman Foundation. And I was impressed on your knowledge and your ability to share it and your ability to connect with people. So the fact that you somehow made your way here with the Chapman foundation for your caring communities, and that we get to work together now. Just makes me so happy because I knew then that it was you were someone that I could tell I would love to connect with in love to work with. So welcome to the team.
Unknown Speaker 3:40
Thank you. I remember that day really well.
Adam Salgat 3:42
Well, I hope for good reasons not because something bad happened are all good reasons. Good. Good to know. Mike, you had a topic idea here about logic and emotion in the classroom. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. If you heard in our little intro, I’m gonna let you take over a little bit and set us up.
Speaker 3 4:01
Absolutely. Thanks, Adam. So I’ve been having lots of phone calls and discussions with a lot of different educators from different backgrounds, not just from here in Texas, where I’m from, but from around the states. And not surprisingly, a lot of us educators are dealing with kids who are coming to school, and they’re really stressed out and their emotions are really high for different reasons. And then there’s another side of that as well to is us as educators inside the classroom, not just from all the stuff that’s happening, but working with our kiddos and our higher emotions. Sometimes our emotions get extremely high as well. And what making I want to do is just kind of have a conversation around our idea, Chapman foundation for caring communities around logic and emotion. Some of the things that are going on inside I guess our brain, okay, and what’s actually happening when we start to get so emotional, that we can’t process or think through things logically to make really good decisions. So if you think about as a teacher in a classroom, when that’s going on with a kid, of course, that could mean certain behaviors that are non productive for them or the classroom with a teacher can occur, right. And then also for us as adults, the people in charge, whether we’re a teacher or parent professional, if we’re overwhelmed with a motion, trying to think through something logically to work with our kiddos can be difficult. And here’s the bottom line to that. If we can’t figure out ways to kind of make this work and support our kiddos and support ourselves, it’s going to make learning really difficult inside the classroom as well. So maybe before we kind of jumped in with initial thoughts and ideas and kind of walking through this process, if you have anything else you’d like to share on logic and emotion and your experiences working in the early childhood realm,
Speaker 1 5:45
I think one thing that’s really important to remember when we’re talking about, you know, really little kids like kids that are maybe say two all the way up through early elementary years, is that sometimes what happens when, when you know, when we talk about an imbalance of logic and emotion, and Mike’s gonna get into that in detail, sometimes what we see is a behavior we don’t want to see. But sometimes what we see is a lack of a behavior we’re looking for in the moment. And so it’s just important to think about, you know, we’re in a classroom, or we’re in our home with a young child. And our expectations in the moment is that we’re seeing something particular from our children, we could be dealing with a behavior that we would maybe label as negative, or we could be dealing with something where it’s, I want this to be happening right now with my child. But it’s not happening. I think if we keep that in mind as we think about a classroom space, or even a home space, that will really help us think through this.
Speaker 3 6:39
That’s a great point, Mickey. And also thinking about how important it is to understand that age, different kiddos, as we kind of talked about this process as well. Because developmentally, it looks a little bit different, as well as kind of what’s going on and what’s happening. And that’s surprising, right? Because little kids don’t have as much experience in life, to be able to think through things logically. And sometimes their emotion can kind of take things over really quickly. So we’ll walk through that process a little bit and kind of think through that use some of the different scenarios, and maybe some different stories. And of course, Adam will kind of always have his his great questions to ask us and have some really great thoughts while we kind of work with this as well, too.
Speaker 1 7:21
Yeah, another thing we might want to keep in mind is that social emotional intelligence is learned over a lifetime, just the way that we would think about academic intelligence. So it’s pretty easy for us as parents or educators to think about the fact that reading is a skill that is built over the years, we would never hand a Harry Potter book, or an adult novel to a five year old and expect them to read it, right. But sometimes, it’s a little bit hard for us as adults to realize that the growth of social emotional skills, like managing our emotions, or empathy, or conflict resolution, or balancing our logic is equally learned skills. And it doesn’t just come by age five, and we figure it out, it has to be modeled for us, it has to be talked about, and we have to learn how to do it.
Speaker 3 8:10
Mickey the key to what you just said is modeling, right. And so us as educators, as teachers, we hold a big part of the learning process to the kids with how we how we role model, even our own emotions, and how we kind of do that the other two things that you really brought up that are important as we think about social emotional learning, and all those pieces that take place, two keys, the self awareness, and the self management pieces that you talked about today will really lend a big part of that, because we have to be aware of when our emotion is kind of getting too much in, we’re losing sight of our logic, as well as when that’s happening with kids, if we can make our own selves aware of that. And we can help the kiddos be aware of that, which is a really tough process. That’s the first step to then being able to manage that as well. And though that self awareness to self management piece is really important for our kids to be able to adapt well inside the world as well as Mickey is absolutely right. It takes a long time for us to develop these skills and continue to build on them, as well. And I will tell you, you know, I’m not a young man, I still have to work on these holes quite a bit because sometimes my emotion can kind of get get pretty high. And honestly, I can’t think logically through certain situations, maybe sometimes I have some unproductive or negative behaviors as a result as well. So what I’m going to do first, I’m just going to kind of talk about the process. And Mickey please feel free to kind of jump in with any thoughts and ideas that you have over logic and emotion as we kind of go through this and then we’ll kind of talk about the student role and the teacher role as well. So if we think about what we really want in life is a healthy balance of logic, how we’re thinking through logically And our emotion. Okay, so everything that happens logically inside our brain comes out of our executive functioning part of our brain or the front part of our brain. That means I can really learn well, I can process information, I can understand things that are coming into me. And I can organize my thoughts in a certain way. Of course, that all has to do with what I can do developmentally at that point in time, in my life stages as well. So if I’m an early childhood kid, or a little bit older, where that looks at emotion is really interesting thing, because we don’t really have a lot of control over the specific feelings that that hit us in our life, right? And so we can, we can have the feeling of angry or sad or grief, or all these different things kind of happening to us. And we may not be able to control that those feelings are occurring, but there’s things that we can do. So those emotions don’t override us. And we can’t think through things logically. So another point I want to kind of bring out is when emotions are super high. So all we’re doing is writing on one of those emotions. And if I’m really angry, I’m really upset because Adam and I are in the same kindergarten class. And Adam is stealing all my crams right, like my box, a 64 Corolla as what do they call that the hernial is, yeah, Crayola, thank
Adam Salgat 11:20
you, not Adam Carolla.
Speaker 3 11:23
And Adam is stealing all my crayons and breaking them in half as a little kid. Right, I might be getting more upset and more upset and more upset and not thinking through things logically as how to problem solve this. But you could just see my behavior, kind of just explode into something really, really negative or unproductive as a result. So making like as, as a teacher, early childhood teacher, like your kindergarten teacher, pre K teacher, you see this kind of unfolding, and you see me getting upset, you know, my emotions high, you can tell I’m losing my logic, what are some things you could think of that would help support me and maybe you anatomy in the situation to kind of alleviate a bigger issue than what could potentially take place inside the classroom?
Speaker 1 12:07
Sure. So you know, a really good early childhood educator is going to notice that they need to go over to that situation. And they need to help both children, particularly if there’s not another adult, readily available, where each of you could take one of those kids. But what’s what’s really crucial in the moment is that you go over and you recognize the student. So Mike, as a little, let’s say, He’s four, and he’s throwing crayons, it’s visible to you that that child is experiencing a high level of emotion. So going over and in front of Adam saying, Mike, I can see you’re really upset, or you’re really frustrated with the situation because Adam is taking your crayons, you know, maybe you kind of noticed this from across the room so you know what transpired you know what’s going on. The key thing to note in the moment is that Mike, as that little four year old interacting with Adam is experiencing a high level of emotion, and emotion in the brain is the bully all the time, it’s always going to win, logic is going to back down to that high level of emotion. So even though you’d like to think that Mike could speak to Adam and say, Stop throwing my crayons, or stop stealing my crayons, or stop doing, you know, whatever’s going on, he can’t, because he’s super frustrated. So you want that to be a teachable moment for what Mike could say to Adam to solve that problem in a logical way. But he can’t think through it. So anything you say to him in that high emotional moment, is kind of going to be a waste of your words, it’s important to turn to Mike or even take him aside and say, I can see you’re very frustrated, I can see you know, put a word to the emotion. Because the very first thing to help children grow socially and emotionally, is putting a word to that emotion. It does two things. It says that that emotion is okay, what he’s feeling in the moment. You know, as Mike touched on earlier, we’re going to feel what we’re going to feel right. And that’s true of little kids too. The second thing it does is it grows Mike Mike’s emotional vocabulary. And we can’t talk about things that we don’t have the vocabulary for. So recognizing for him, this is what you’re feeling. And this is what’s going on the facts and situation. So what’s causing it Adam is taking your crayons, you are feeling very frustrated. And then we’re gonna give him like a little bit of time to go. Yeah, I’m like taking my crayons and he’s probably going to kind of, you know, really like spout out stuff and kind of, you know, kind of talk about that moment. But that’s the only way for Mike to vent out all of that emotion that’s bullying his brain. And until you get that emotion out, you can’t talk about the behavior that he might want to choose instead. Because the behavior instead might be to say to Adam, Adam, please don’t take my crayons. Right? Talk about that behavior until we get the emotion out.
Adam Salgat 15:00
All Adams gonna jump in and say that this is such, I feel like I’m like making bullet point notes because my five year old and my almost three year old do this kind of thing a lot right? In their time do I think as a parent, I do exactly what you just said, I tried to identify and help them learn and, and then there are times I’m like, you just jump in and you start, you don’t even care, you start telling them what to do and you’re not listening and you know, give them back or whatever, right? So it’s really good, it’s a really good reminder to tell, you know, to mention to us about, you know, use it, we want it to be a teachable moment. But it can’t really be a teachable moment until the some of that emotion gets released, and tried to talk to them. And then the idea of helping them put a word on it. And, you know, to grow their vocabulary, so they can describe things, makes me realize, I might need to expand a little bit of my vocabulary and build my skill set in that space in order to help them build their skill set. So it’s another reminder, as a parent, as an adult, to potentially improve ourselves to help our little ones.
Speaker 1 16:05
Yeah, and one thing you want to remember is just that emotional vocabulary with a little child, you’re going to keep those feelings kind of basic, I’m sad, I’m frustrated, I’m, you know, as they get a little older, expand and make those words more specific so that they can communicate better. But you know, I often say like in our parenting webinars or our roundtables, what if you were grown up and you walked into a restaurant, you didn’t have utensils, and you have soup in front of you, and you needed to ask the server for a spoon, but you didn’t know the word spoon? Think about what that would do for you. So if we expect our children to express their emotions, they have to have the vocabulary to be able to do that.
Speaker 3 16:40
And I think that’s one of the biggest keys to Mickey is you kind of walk through that process. And it was, it was just beautifully done. And I’m so excited that you’re on our team to really think about what’s going on inside the kiddo, right? What the kiddo needs to be able to do. But also as the adult or as a teacher, you’re role modeling the proper ways for that self awareness to self management, because it’s not like an animatic change, like just flipping the switch. But it is something that they start to identify with emotions over time. And that’s a really critical part. Because if we don’t allow the kid, what one is time, right, and the other is just that, that ability to kind of be able to bet out what’s going on inside them. They can’t come back to like a homeostasis level where logic and emotion are balanced. And if we don’t work on that, what’s going to happen is that kids are going to stay really emotional, we can make the situation worse, with even more unproductive behaviors with how we act or react to the situation as the adult. Would you like to speak to that for a moment?
Speaker 1 17:46
Yeah, I think you know, when you’re when you’re over there, and let’s just go back to that situation with crayon you’re over there. And you’re talking to little four year old Mike and he’s so upset. If you look, I’ve been there as a teacher and as a parent, when I turn my head, there was a kid throwing crayons or my daughter my kids when they were little, my daughter’s hitting my son. And what happens to me right away, I’m upset I go over to my kids, I’m my voice now is raised, you know, you go over the crayons situation, you were doing something as a teacher, you were busy. Now you have to deal with the crayon situation. So you go over, make sure when you go over to deal with that you take a deep breath or do what you need to do before you go handle that situation that sounds easier than it is. But figure out over time as the educator how you can do that. And when you go over there and you know, particularly with young children, your your nonverbals and your your sort of yoke, your physical presence is very important getting on their level, if you have to kneel down or sit down, get eye level with them, so that they can see you taking a deep breath, your emotions are not raised because what you don’t want is if your emotions are high, now Little Mike who’s already upset is going to get bullied, he’s gonna get more emotional. And Adam is probably also in the situation going to get more emotional and now you’re just sort of throwing fuel on the fire. But modeling how you could take a deep breath you can come down it some children really like touch you know, you can you gotta get to know the kiddo Do they like you to just kind of put your hand on their shoulder? Do they like you to sit down with them? Whatever seems to work for that child and what you learn over time. And then as as you’re working through that feeling and what happened and Little Mike is just, you know, oh, he took my crayons and he’s kind of, you know, freaking out. Kind of say, Okay, let’s take a deep breath, and you’ll start to see their emotion come down. And when you see it come down, it’s very visible. That’s when you can then say, okay, if Adam takes your crayons Next time, let’s try this or you can come get me for help, you know whatever’s age appropriate for the child. Adam mentioned when when the three of us happen to be talking earlier, offline. Learn about expectations for behavior. Sometimes we’ll have parents or educators participate in our roundtables. And when they’re hearing us talk about this part of the process, they’re looking at it like it’s a pass on the behavior. Or, okay, well, it’s like an excuse. It’s not a pass on expectations for children, which you can’t talk about the expectations and the alternative behavior and what they shouldn’t be doing, until you get them in a space where they can hear you. Emotion plugs up their layers, and they just can’t think through it with you like that. So if you want to make the most amount of progress with a child, talk to them when they’re in a logical state, not in an emotional state.
Speaker 3 20:46
Absolutely. In another part, I mean, I’m going to add a layer on to that. And this is really, regardless of age, and you know, being a junior high school teacher, be really careful when emotions high with a student or a group of students or whatever to lead with a consequence, before logic kind of comes back down. And the reason it and I’m not saying don’t do a consequence, but what I’m trying to say is, if Adam is super upset, right, and he is really mad, because something happened, and he threw a book at the wall or whatever. If I just say, Hey, Adam, you’re going to be suspended for four days, when he is really upset, it’s just going to make the situation oftentimes worse, right? So if we allow that opportunity for the logic in the motion to balance, then we can have the conversation and work on the self management and self awareness, and then talk consequences as a result. And it’s really easy sometimes for us as adults to think, well, I threatened the consequence, that’s going to make the person stop. If we’re so overbalanced with that emotion, oftentimes it won’t. Oftentimes it won’t. Now for some kiddos, if it’s climbing, it might write. But if you go through the same process of letting them vent it out, and then getting everybody to that logic and emotion level, the situation is going to be a lot better for us as adults as well, too, because we’re writing about a motion wave, we have to make sure we’re carrying our logic as well, in that area. It’s fascinating really, to think about, right, and we’ve all done it well, like if you do this, what’s gonna happen maxing it out, everyone’s stealing my crayons and breaking them. And it’s chaos.
Adam Salgat 22:24
I love this example, because it definitely ties to a lot of pieces that I deal with on a daily basis having young ones, what about are teenagers, parents, with teenagers or teachers that are working with middle school to high school kids? logic and emotion probably looks a little bit different for them, does it not?
Speaker 3 22:40
Yes or no? Okay. Interestingly enough, it’s kind of different because sometimes with with older kids, they’re not as quick to maybe tell you, or to show you that they’re emotionally becoming unstable for whatever reason, right. So they might be bottled capital it in or masking it, or hiding it, and then it just kind of blows pretty quick. And there’s lots of different reasons why that could be. But it’s still that same idea. As Mickey says, it’s like really important to get to know your students and your kiddos and kind of see where that’s at. Because you have you know, introverts and extroverts and everything in between. Oftentimes, your kids who are extroverts you can tell whether emotion is starting to ride, whether they’re super excited about something or they’re super upset over something, right. Some of your, your introverted kids, it’s just tougher, because they’re very quiet and almost seems calm, but that emotion is happening as well, too. And I’m not saying that that can’t happen in little kids, because it can, but you just have to understand at any point in time, if you don’t know your kiddo, certain, really well. There’s lots of different things that you can kind of be working with in dealing with that one time. So Mickey, any thoughts? Do you have teenage kids? Or ones that were teenagers?
Speaker 1 23:55
Yeah, we just survived the change. Apparently, I’m still here to talk about it. I think Yeah. And you can have kids like in this wouldn’t be uncommon in a middle school classroom, that you’ve got kids that are coming in and their day, they’re already starting their day. I mean, it’s gonna happen with little kids too. But let’s say you got a middle a middle schooler, and they’re already starting their day with a high level of emotion, something happened at home, you know, just because they’re 13. They’ve got a lot going on and, and they might be coming into a classroom and what you might see in terms of what we would call a behavior, it’s they’re not engaged in the learner. And it’s really easy as a teacher to think to yourself, well, they just don’t care about their schoolwork. It probably comes from another place that’s rooted in an emotion and if you can get to know that child and really gain their trust, where they’re willing to talk to you about what’s going on. It might not look like it you know, it’s easy to see somebody throwing crayons. It’s not always super visible to us when a kid sits in the back of the room and they’re not engaged in a lesson. Get to know them. So they’re willing to get some of that out and let it out to you. So that then they can come to that space of learning in a better place. We’re so concerned in the school day about kids doing the math lesson, doing the history lesson, picking up all the content, you can have a middle schooler that spends their entire day in a in a sort of private emotional state. I guarantee you, they’re not going to pick up on very much content that day. So it seems like it takes
Speaker 3 25:28
you through the day without us even knowing it, right? Like, we’re like, being quiet, he’s fine. He’s fine. Being able to find that engagement level, because if we’re overwritten with with emotion, that logic is not going to be there, learning is out the door. Right?
Speaker 1 25:41
Right. So go into that student and saying something like, you know, I can tell you, you know, you maybe have something going on, or something’s kind of occupying your mind and starting that conversation where they might open up to you, it’s hard for a teenager, I mean, those are tough years. But given them that chance to get it out, or finding the other adults in the school that they are close to, and are maybe willing to bend it to be willing to note that at older ages, for a little while, it might not be you, but who are they close enough to that they could do that so they can make the most of their learning day?
Adam Salgat 26:13
You guys that’s such it reminds me of days that I had in high school, when I knew I wasn’t going to retain much because of what was going on with brands. And it’s not a highly emotional thing for me right now. But I know, like it was a big difference when I finally like released a little bit of like, what was going on with friends. And I did you know, I act it out. But for me, because of the maybe the upbringing, upbringing I had, my acting out was more of a silly or more of a an outstanding way instead of a real negative what you would consider maybe negative. But once I got to that point, I mean, I started to flourish more, because like, once I got once I released what was happening, my brain was able to comprehend, as adults, as teachers walking into the room, you talked about this with kids, you know, the opportunity that they might be walking in with something on their mind. What about from the teacher perspective, who obviously might have something on their mind that has nothing to do with their work? It might be home related as well. But even work related and everything that we’ve been through in the last year, two years, with regulations and changes and the uncertainty of like, are we going to virtual tomorrow? how quickly things going to change? What about thinking about it from their perspective?
Speaker 3 27:29
Well, I’ll talk about Mickey, you can kind of think that this process has a lot to share, as teachers, Perez, anybody who’s working inside the education system, even parents, the first most important thing to recognize is we’re always in that role model. situation, right. But also understand, like, there’s kind of this term, you need to be a role model 100% of the time, 100% of the time, you need to get the role model, right, easy to stay, really easy to say. But at the end of the day, we’re human too. Yeah, we bring life to the classroom, just like our kiddos, right. And so our logic and our emotion can get out of balance pretty quick. It’s have to think about two things, one, knowing that this is a really important thing for us to role model, what are the things we can start to do when our emotion starts to creep up, whether it’s a kid kind of pushing our buttons, or it’s a behavior that’s happening? Or maybe it’s an outside, you know, stress that we’re dealing with? How do we bring our logic back to an equal level with our emotions, that’s really important. And there’s another side of it, too, we actually have training on this inside the Chapman Foundation, what do we do when like maybe our emotion gets so high, we lose our logic, and a non productive behavior occurs for us as an adult in front of the kid, right? So there’s an interesting scenario to think about it is what do you do when you mess up, like you got to go back and fix it, because that is a part of self management in the social emotional world that we want kids to be able to do. Because if I blow up at a student, and I start yelling at him and pointing my finger and doing those negative behaviors, and nothing, I don’t change it, or fix it, or go back and work on it, but the kid, the kid is learning that that behavior is actually okay. Because I as the adult, I’m the one doing. So that’s like a big thing that you have to really work on as the adult to think about. But also just like Mickey said, if we’re working on the kid to just label that feeling first, and then tie it to the behaviors that are occurring, when they are at that homeostasis level, there’s so much more work that we can kind of do. So maybe your thoughts with with the adult side of it as well, because we are human we have to balance too, right.
Speaker 1 29:39
Yeah. And when you’re talking about educators that, you know, they’re putting in so much work, particularly right now they’re putting in extra work, and it’s a difficult job as it is, I would say make sure as an educator that you have a way when you’re talking about you know, it’s the morning or maybe it’s lunchtime and you’re just full of a lot of emotion because you’ve you’ve got a lot going on you’ve got some challenges kids in your classroom, make sure you know what way you’re going to vent that out. If it’s writing it down, if you’ve got a co worker, that’s your best friend might call them swim buddies in in our organization, and your person that doesn’t mind you taking a few minutes just to say, here’s what I’m worried about today, here’s what’s bothering me, when I start my day, maybe it’s significant other at home, it really doesn’t matter as long as you have your way. You know, it could be deep breath, it could be a walk, it could be whatever, make sure you have that, you know, many organizations over the past year have developed some pretty cool ways for staff to come together very briefly in the morning just for like an emotion dump, or here’s what I’m worried about, you might be that person in your organization to start something like that. And I would encourage you to do that if you don’t already have it. And then make sure that I think it’s great what Mike’s covering that if you make the mistake, and when you go back, if the child is old enough, you this wouldn’t be appropriate for maybe you know, a three year old, but let’s say they’re six, or they’re 10. If you’ve messed up, when you go back, say, you know, I was really emotional, I was really frustrated. Here’s what I should have done, let’s try to start over again. Because then what you’re saying to them is, my emotions get out of balance, too. And it’s alright, because it happens to all of us. And it always will.
Speaker 3 31:18
Such good advice about that, too, is like when the adult is able to do that, that relationship gets so much tighter with that kid. And they work even harder because you feel a connection when someone’s able to say, hey, guess what? wasn’t all that awesome. And it’s not just the I’m sorry, it’s here’s what I should have done. Because sometimes we see this with with adults too. And you see it like maybe in Little League, or you see it in Sunday school or the classroom, or just parents kind of doing it like two kids kind of needling each other and arguing, you know, kind of that biting stuff. And finally, the adult steps in and kind of like separates them and says, All right, you to shake hands and say you’re sorry, kids grab each other hands and I sorry, well, they’re still at that high emotional state, right. But nothing was really solved other than a consequence of saying, having to say you’re sorry, as opposed to the learning process, what make you just kind of walk through it, the more important part of that is. So when you see sometimes adults just say they’re sorry, when they’re not truly sorry, right, because they’ve just learned over time, it’s just what we say and like, you’re not really responsible for the behavior that you have. So there’s a lot of things you can do just with logic and emotion to think about the power of just teaching this and working through this with yourself and your kiddos.
Adam Salgat 32:36
An example that I want to throw out there real quick is I was talking to a friend a few weeks ago about his work situation. And he was explaining to me how you know, by middle of the afternoon, He’s normally or that even middle of the afternoon, like before noon, He’s normally pretty stressed and burnt out. And some of it has to do with work, some of it has to do with, you know, at home. And I just talked to him a little bit about, and truly I think, indirectly, I’m talking about logic and emotion. But I was telling him, if each day, you’re coming in on a scale of one to 10, and you’re coming in at a seven, already, every day at a seven gives you very little room to handle what’s in front of you, and to deal with whatever might be on your plate. So whatever you need to do to come in even at a six or hopefully, closer to zero, or one or two, whatever you need to do to try to get there. That’s that what I you know, I told them, I said, so if you need to call me to talk about it, or if you need to, if it really boils down to a new job, then that may be where you have to go down the road. But for now, just think about it from day to day, and how do you come in at a lower number. And when we started thinking or talking about logic and emotion and story popped in my head, because I think that’s really what I was talking to him about was coming in with his emotions, not in check, as if he cannot do that. Because I feel like when we tell people to get things in check, it’s like they’re failing. That’s not really what we’re trying to say is just the stereotypical or a typical phrase that we put out there. But I think that’s really what I was trying to say to him was try to find a way to balance these things out. So you come in with more space, right?
Speaker 1 34:18
Yeah, for sure. And it’s, it’s also really important to remember that we’re, you know, we’re not trying to get rid of all of our emotion. I mean, emotion is a part of every decision that we make every day. It’s what makes us human, it’s it you know, we don’t want it to be gone. Just want to make sure that there’s a significant amount of logic there so we can make the right choices every day. And it’s also important to remember that both emotions that we we don’t like feeling and emotions that we do like feeling can drown out logic. You know, we can be super happy we can be so excited that we can’t think so. You know, there’s still an importance to getting that balance there so we can make the right choices in them. homie, but it sounds it sounds like your friend needs to figure out how he’s how he’s going to level set every day, and how he’s going to find that, that place to vent and get those emotions out.
Adam Salgat 35:11
Yep. And it made me I made a note while we were sitting here to check in, because it’s been a couple of weeks. And I know he’s all right. But it just it makes sense to go back. See how he’s doing? Make sure, right. I mean, that’s what we, what we want to do for people be there, right?
Speaker 3 35:25
On the listening can always help someone. Take out that plug and bring that logic back down. It’s kind of like, even in class when we teach, like, if we’re asking questions, or we’re giving advice, sometimes we keep that noggin, and that emotion gets even higher and a lot, you know. So that’s always one of those wonderful pieces, just like you said, out of checking in and just listening will be great for you.
Adam Salgat 35:51
Mike, I saw you were nodding your head a little bit when Mickey mentioned that sometimes it’s positive emotions to what we would label as positive emotions that can come into play when we get out of balance. Can you touch on that a little more?
Speaker 3 36:01
Yeah, absolutely. So teaching middle school, I saw this quite a bit with my kiddos. And I’m sure Mickey’s probably has more than a million different stories with little kids as well when they come to school or class. And they’re really excited about something that is going on in their life or something that’s about to occur. For me, it was always at the beginning of the year, and with my, especially the boys who were playing football, and then a football game that day, and they were so excited to be able to play school football for the first time, right, like have cheerleaders out there in the fans, and the parents and all that, that they could not focus on anything else. And they would be so emotionally excited, they kind of lose the logic. Sometimes they would cause problems in classes, they’d be talking about it or not focusing on their work or whatever. And so that even though it was a positive emotion, it was still overwhelming everything that they could do to think through things logically as well. So Mickey, any thoughts on that? Yeah,
Speaker 1 37:00
I mean, this happens, like at any age, right. And even as adults, when we we get super excited about something we can, you know, I remember the day I found out that I was getting this job. And I was trying to explain this to my family, and I’m cooking and the pot is like over boiling on the stove, because I couldn’t think through the fact that I was cooking dinner while I was having this conversation. It happens to all of us, you know, it’s not a bad thing. But you know, again, giving that person the opportunity to talk about it and get it out really helps them say, oh, yeah, and I was doing this, or I’m supposed to be acting like this.
Speaker 3 37:36
And you know, it’s really important to recognize with kids, because sometimes they get in trouble. And they have a really positive feeling or something really exciting is going to happen. And it’s the same opportunity that Mickey said, like labeling the emotion, letting them kind of bring it down to Okay, here’s how I need you to kind of focus through this because they still have to work through that process. And we don’t want them to feel like oh, I shouldn’t be having this feeling, just as Mickey said, but the other feelings that can be more thought of as negative as well, too, because feelings are important part of life. Right? If something happens, and we’re sad, we need to be able to express that kind of work through that something happens that we’re super excited about, or whatever, we still need to go through those same processes. We don’t want to eliminate the feelings. We want to work on the process. So we can think through things logically.
Adam Salgat 38:24
So as we wrap up the podcast here today, I’m gonna throw it out there. I’d like to get a key takeaway from each of you just something for our listeners to think about. As we finished the podcast. Show of hands who wants to go first? Nobody, nobody raised their Oh, Mike. Mike, there’s Mike. All right. So Mike raised his hand first. So let’s, let’s see, what’s the key takeaway you have for our audience? Mike?
Speaker 3 38:48
I think one of the key takeaways for me is just as a parent, I got two teenage daughters, ones who’s a freshman in college, one who’s a sophomore in high school. And right at this moment in time, we have some birthday celebrations. One of them’s turning 16, getting a driver’s license, the other one just went to college, and it’s doing really well. And so there is a lot of like, a lot of excitement in the world, but just kind of thinking about logic and emotion, where they’re at where I’m at, and just kind of helping through those processes as well. So it was kind of a good process for me to go through, even though I know this how to teach it, to put it in front of them, right.
Adam Salgat 39:23
Reminders don’t hurt. That’s for sure. Mickey, any thoughts on a key takeaway for our audience, something for them to ponder?
Speaker 1 39:31
Yeah, you know, if you’re an educator, and you’re listening to this, and it sort of feels like, well, this is going to take more time out of my day. The way I would look at this is, is kind of invested time because if you take the couple minutes to do this with a child or a team, what you’re going to get is more return then when you try to have the logical conversation, so just kind of think of it as like you’re gonna get more out of that time with them than you would if you just jump right into the logic. So invest that little bit of time into your students into your colleagues, other people in your life. And I’ll tell you when you get really good at it, this is a really good common conversation then to use with the parents of those kids in your classroom. It’s a super easy thing to pass on and to teach to parents. So as your you know, your parent teacher conferences or you’re touching base about kiddos, you can say, this is how I’m handling this in our class with your child. How can I help you do this?
Adam Salgat 40:27
Thank you both. for taking the time to talk to us about logic and emotion in the classroom, at home, wherever or in just our own personal daily life, how we can manage ourselves better. Thank you both so much.
Speaker 3 40:41
Thank you, we appreciate it. And Mickey I’m so excited for our team and that you were able to add so much value to today’s podcast I’m really excited about doing future education podcast with you don’t you think Adam like Nick? He’s a great casting just continue to keep bringing on board we’re
Adam Salgat 40:57
not going to hear me argue. I don’t know. She might she might say something but I’m not gonna hear me argue against it.
Unknown Speaker 41:03
No, thank you. This was fun, guys. I look forward to more