Opening up the room at 10:20.

Note to listeners-- I opened it too early. The room didn't need to be open till 10:30. Extra recording time here. Took out the first 10 minutes.

I have also spent 32 years as a martial arts teacher. And since 2011, I've been the communications director for the Breakthrough Men's Community, a nonprofit agency that's dedicated to healing, recovery, and support. It was through my experience at Breakthrough that I came to do these trainings.

In 2018, Dr. Richard Schwartz, the developer of the Internal Family Systems therapeutic model, found out about the work that I was doing embedding the IFS principles into my classroom and he asked that I team up with members of his foundation to explore the possibility of spreading these concepts into classrooms across the nation. So since 2018, I've been working with the team and we've been doing this across the nation. Things are really taking off. And I couldn't be happier to be what Dr. Schwartz calls a "hope merchant." So again, thank all of you for taking a chance on hope.

With that, I'd like to temper today's expectations just a tiny bit by telling you an obvious truth and a small secret. So we're all here under the strangest of times. I mean, look at what we're experiencing just right now. How many of us did something like this five years ago? And we're trying our level best to do a good job within a system that is challenging enough on its best days. And the truth is that you, I, or any other educators in the world are going to be carrying a massive set of burdens right now that no one person can possibly lift alone.

And by that, I explicitly mean that no one can be perfect under these circumstances. All of us-- educators or students-- will be simultaneously worried about one another, our own family's education, the future of the country, our current or future employability, paying the bills, the health of our loved ones, the fires, the air, the planet, and 1,000 other not-so-little things. This, I will say confidently, is too much stress for anyone to bear alone.

And now here's the little secret. When I'm in the classroom, I don't have to be perfect. I don't have to be perfect because I don't carry this alone. And in fact, my students don't have to be perfect, either. We don't have to because we've built community inside the classroom and we support each other when things are challenging.

I want you to imagine that. I'll describe my students in a minute, but I'll just say this-- I work with a room full of, let's call them students of promise, who would scare the pants off most educators. And we've built a community that supports one another so we don't have to carry impossible burdens on our own. So that's a little clue about where we're heading with today's presentation. And before we go any further, let me pose some rhetorical questions to you.

So these are the four big ideas of the day. Most of what drives us sits below the surface. Most good and bad intentions-- or excuse me, most good and bad behaviors are actually driven by the best of intentions. Seems like a really contrary kind of idea. By responding to the underlying need, it is possible to interrupt the often counterproductive behavioral loop. So if I go straight at the need that's being exemplified by the behavior, I can interrupt the loop that the mind gets stuck in. The last piece is the locus, our target area. I'm not talking about who you think I am.

So here are the four questions. What if I told you that most people are unaware of the deeper motivations that lie behind the majority of their surface behaviors? So most of us don't know why we do what we do, other than a very shallow, surface level awareness. Our deeper motivations are like very buried.

And what if I told you that most-- most-- of what we call good behavior or bad behavior is actually driven from the same source with exactly the same goal? Though that goal is actually well-intentioned, both of these two adaptive patterns keep us stuck in a kind of behavioral loop that is actually quite hard to pull ourselves out of. Think of what you do at the end of a stressful day. That behavior is well-intentioned, but is it healthy and does it let you thrive?

Or think of what you do when you've had a conflict with someone and you keep replaying the mechanisms-- excuse me, you keep replaying the tapes inside your head. These loops, both of them, one looks kind of benign or even positive, and then the other one looks kind of excruciating. They're both about survival. They're both survival mechanisms and they're not about thriving. When compressed under extreme conditions, they can actually be very dangerous it's curious to note that these behaviors, both of them, rarely resolve the underlying need that created them. So my good and bad behaviors that I'm out there exemplifying each day rarely address the need that underlies them.

So the third idea, what if I told you that by understanding the elements within this internal system, you could interrupt that normally cascading loop people get trapped in? I want you to be seeing your students here at this point. And think of the loops they get trapped in their mind. And which in the end, will often provide-- prove to be quite devastating.

In the classroom, it can be that 15-second window where things get out of hand and an escalation begins. And we will often lose the student at that moment. It's a little tiny 15-second window where something embarrassing or something shameful pops up and boom. We know we're not going to get them back. It's a bad judgment, a bad decision, a bad reaction, and then we lose somebody. But if you know how to connect with the underlying need, you can address most situations in an open, direct, and compassionate manner ahead of time so that the fuse never even gets lit.

And number four, I'm not really talking about your students. I'm really talking about the educators within the system. We bring our own stories with us to the job and we get caught in our own loops. And in the end, we're unable to be responsive to the needs of the human beings that are standing right in front of us.

It works like this. If any of you know anything at all about family therapy, when the family shows up to the therapist's office and says, if we could only get little Johnny to behave, our lives would be so much better. All of our problems would be fixed. You know that the therapist is going to look at them and say, yeah, sorry, man. It's never the kids. It's always about parents. So you want to deal with the parental figures if you want to have real impact on the system.

In this instance, if we wanted to have an impact on the system, we have to deal with the educators before we ever get to the students. As we say in my classroom, if you want to change the world, change your community first. If you want to change your community, change your home first. If you want to change your home, change yourself first. So as teachers, if you want to change your class.

And finally, I'll say this to wrap up this part. A lot of our motivational techniques don't work with our students. If you've ever noticed that, that we try all these motivational techniques with our students, but we still can't get them to push themselves across that line. Well part of the reason that doesn't work is because we're secretly trying to get them to meet our needs instead of their own. They sense that the story-- the teacher's story is driving the experience and their own stories become progressively less important as they go on. They sense that they are no longer in the central part of their own story.

We're going to start with a little bit of the why this is important. And this is taken from the census and world population review. And it's about my region and my classroom specifically, but I use the slide to make a point about impossibility. With these numbers, a person can easily get overwhelmed by the scale of the need. And I'm going to break this down for you guys a little bit. This is the adult population in the city of Salinas. We've got about 108,000 adults there. And the two middle numbers don't really have nearly as much bearing on the case as we do for that bottom number. Of 108,000 adults, we have more than 30,000 that have no diploma.

So with a number like that-- I mean, that's incredible. That's more than one in four people don't have a diploma. It's super easy to get overwhelmed by that number and think, oh my God, how are we ever going to make a dent in this thing? But it's not our job to be superheroes. It's much more realistic and much more humble than that. It's our job-- it's always our job-- to catch the one person who is standing in front of us right now. We block out the entire world and any delusions of grandeur we might carry about ourselves. We stop saying, it's going to land on my shoulders alone. I'm not getting any help from my boss, I'm not getting any help from my coworkers. Da, da, da, da, da. We push that all to the side and instead we stay present and connected, and we listen to the needs of the one student who's looking at us at this moment.

I'm going to take a second to dive a little deeper with this idea. Many times, that feeling of being overwhelmed by a task that seems insurmountable is exactly what our students are experiencing, too. They're overwhelmed by something that seems insurmountable. It's my belief that if we can listen to ourselves and to what we might be really asking for beneath the surface of that overwhelm, we might be able to spot similar needs within our students. Said a different way, when I'm overwhelmed by the size of a task, what am I really saying about myself? What are my beliefs about my skills, my abilities, my level of empowerment? And most importantly, what am I saying about my self-worth if I fail?

As I said, teachers have their own cascading internal loops that are driving their behaviors. And those loops, though well-intentioned, can make doing our jobs much, much harder. If I think I can barely make a dent in the numbers, or that my efforts won't help anyone, or that one student is just too much for me, or worse-- this is the one that's the really crazy one-- I can do it all. I could just sacrifice my life on the altar of education. You can imagine how long I'm going to be able to do the work before burnout sets in. So you can see that by looking more deeply at our own internal systems, we find that we can be more sensitive and more responsive to what might be going on with our students when it comes time to motivate them.

So this is the scale of the challenge that I face. And you might face something similar in your own work. You're all in adult ed, so you know that there are thousands of crazy factors that make our jobs insanely difficult. We run into impossible every single day. So how do you handle it? I'd say you handle those seemingly impossible tasks the same way you'd eat an elephant. Now you know how you do that, right? You eat an elephant one bite at a time. You don't focus on how large the task is, you focus on the bite that's right in front of you. You take that single bite, and whenever possible, you don't eat alone.

So that's our task. To catch the one student who might have dropped from our class had we not taken the time to reach out, to ask and listen, and then connect. And we don't eat that elephant alone. Think of how brave we are asking our students to be, how vulnerable we're asking them to be when we ask them to raise their hands and ask for help. We ask them to ask for help. Do we ever ask for help? Do we ever raise our hands and say, hey, this is what my need is?

So this is my content area. You can see we do math, English composition, science, social studies, lit. It's a lecture-based direct instruction. We do not do study hall style. I'm on the floor yakking at people all day long. And in this case, I'm on my chair in a digital world yakking to people all day long. We do managed entry with open exit and we have attendance requirements. So please bear in mind when you see the top of the list and you see that math is on there, what I'm really talking about is that we go from whole numbers to algebra two in about 12 months.

I keep this slide here for two reasons that are not necessarily obvious. Number one, you can see that the material that I'm introducing today can be applied in almost any curriculum across the board. And number two, there are some boundaries around behavior. Unlike a lot of GED teachers, I lecture directly. That's just one of many boundaries around my own behavior. And for my students, there are attendance requirements that I have established that work as boundaries around their behavior. So that's a little clue that we're not just all free form and groovy.

Structure is terribly important to the learning experience, not just for the brain to make meaning, but for the heart to build trust as well. Trust aroused the central nervous system to settle down while the patterns allow the brain to make connections. Being a 30-year-plus martial artist, you can imagine that I'm a big fan of practice making perfect, but we can't practice if we don't have some structure. Structure's at the heart of discipline, but trust me when I say this-- traditional discipline is not at all what I'm talking about. We don't go for the old fashioned punitive approach to discipline in my class because we never need to. I will explain that later on. It was improbable and I'm going to explain who I'm working with.

So this is the data for my classroom, and it fluctuates year-by-year, so please don't assume that it's burned in stone. If you guys know anything about adult ed from all your years of experience in it, you know that it's always just chaos. There's just so much chaos in terms of the numbers. So this is a rough estimate. The first of the red items is there for a reason. It's to show you that nothing can be judged by its appearance. I often have university graduates from other countries that are in my classroom. Not everybody in my room is somebody who has dropped out of school.

And the second red item is to show that not everyone is there by choice. So you can imagine what it means to have 10% of your population there mandated, either by the courts, the county, employer, or somebody in their lives. It's not always stated at the time of orientation when they come in to see me, but over time, my students feel comfortable and they feel accepted, so they self identify. So yeah, not everybody's in the room because they want to be.

So I have multi-level, multi-lingual, complex diagnoses, complex trauma, and complex lives. When I say multi-level, I mean the reading level ranges from third grade to college, math level ranges from second grade to college. And remember we go from whole numbers to algebra two with folks who are starting at a second grade level. We also have survivors of horrifyingly trama. The most unbelievable kind of trauma that you can imagine. In terms of diagnoses, it is a normal Monday to walk into the classroom and to see either blindness, or deafness, or spina bifida, quadriplegia, cerebral palsy, stage four cancer, cystic fibrosis, traumatic brain injury-- either from violence, or from a work accident, or something else. Those are some of the health conditions.

In terms of other issues, we have gang members, ex-cons, folks waiting on sentencing, people who are dealing with addiction, people who aren't dealing with their addiction. We have multiple health issues, like bipolar disorder-- mental health issues, excuse me. Bipolar disorder, anxiety, depression, schizophrenia. We have learning disabilities, like dyslexia, dyscalculia, and so, so many people on the autism spectrum. We also deal with homelessness, unemployment, and immigration issues like you wouldn't believe, while serving an age range that goes from 18 to 80. And it's in this room that we make a community.

I'll give you guys just one example. I got an email the other day from one of my favorite graduates, who is now in college after drifting in and out of the system for several years. Time in and out of incarceration. He sent me an email with one of those charming math mysteries that sort of magically produce a person's birth year after just a few calculations. And he said to me that he thinks that it proves that math is divine. This is coming from somebody who absolutely hated math upon entry into my class. So big success, right? High school dropout, got locked up so many times, he's now clean and he's in college.

Then came two more separate, short emails, just a couple of lines. In the first he wrote, did you ever imagine that you could have a Norteño gang member and a Sureño gang member in your class, and they could become the most very best friends because they met in your class? That's the first email. And in the second he wrote, D is from-- and then he names the barrio. And he says, I'm from-- and then he names his barrio. And he says, because of you, because of your class, we became brothers until death. This is proof that math is divine. So I want you to just hold that anecdote in mind and let's do a little data mining to suss out what it really means to put connection in the center of our world.

So I saw a hand go up for a question. Let me see if I can click this and find out what's going on.

Tim, I don't see a hand up. So if someone did have a question, they could put it in the chat, as well. And I'll bring it to your attention.

OK, great. Thank you.

All right. So here's what we're really up against in my classroom. And this is going to sound extreme, but I'm really doing this for a reason. I'm not sure how many of you know about the ACEs survey, but ACEs stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences. You can see them up on the screen. Those are the 10 questions that they ask. And what they have discovered is that 7 out of 10 major diseases directly correspond to the number of ACEs that you have. There's a 20-year difference in life expectancy. The National Institute of Justice raises the chances of juvenile arrest by 59%.

In terms of breaking the cycle, ACEs produce epigenetic markers that influence health outcomes across three generations. So if grandma had ACEs while she was young-- particularly while she's pregnant, that's really the biggest thing, particularly while she's pregnant-- then her daughter, who's in her belly and already has all the eggs of the third generation inside her little belly, is going to be affected by the drama that the grand-- the trauma that the grandmother experiences. The mother will then have an epigenetic reaction to it that will be produced in her daughter. So three generations off of trauma. When we do this work well, we're thinking about the future. We're not just thinking about right now.

One major point that we address in my larger 12-hour workshops concerns how trauma affects brain structure. There will be certain thoughts that cannot be had until the neural pathways are built. And if the brain has devoted energy to survival mechanisms, then the finer points of geometry, mitosis, and iambic pentameter have nowhere to land. It's not just that your students can't pay attention, it's that there is no neural pathway in certain sections of the mind that allow the ideas that you're sharing to connect. So when we say in one ear and out the other, it is very legitimate to be perceiving that way. So part of what we're doing is building brain. We actually build alternative neural pathways that then support an overall healthier system.

This ACEs data is, of course, influenced by the type of cultural prism under which it was constructed. And the data actually changes when we modify the questions to include a different cultural perspective. So the questions that they use, they say prison when they ask the question, how many of your-- did you ever have a family member who was sent to prison? But if we flip that and we say-- because people are going to be locked in county sometimes for years of their lives-- so we switch that vocabulary and we say, were they in prison, were they in jail, were they in juvenile hall, were they locked up by ICE, were they kidnapped, either politically or personally? Then my numbers in my classroom go way up above the 31% that you see on the screen there.

When we expand addiction to include any kind-- alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, work, religion, all of those types of addictions that a person can submerge themselves as a way to deal with an impossible reality, then the number goes up. When we add migration experiences that cause losses of primary relationships, how many of your students have immigrated, and whom did they have to leave behind, what did they have to leave behind?

If we add homelessness to this mix, when we add the question of time-- how many times did the trauma happen to you? Or when we stretch the age limit out to 20 years old instead of 18. It's almost unbearable to consider how much trauma our students are enduring. Many will actually lose their lives to this. This is present every day in our schools and to ignore it is to say-- or to say that it's too large to take on is to abandon our students in the time of their deepest need and most profound powerlessness.

It's important to say something about trauma here. You can see that they're capturing some things that are prominent and others that are not as obvious. The work that we're going to be doing is going to bring us right up against both. In the classroom, we'll bump up against both. Really dramatic trauma issues, those things that are a little bit more under the radar. So I will see students dysregulate in my classroom from the triggered memory of shame and educational abandonment. Almost as intensely as they might dysregulate from the triggered memory of physical abuse. Excuse me.

So if you've ever experienced a trauma trigger in yourself or someone else, you've watched somebody else experience, you can imagine how hard it is to get the brain back online. So in my class, we don't run from this. We don't deny it, and we don't demand that anyone just get over it and go back to work. We never do that. We say that there's no such way-- no such thing as getting over it. There's getting through it. And healing ourselves to the point-- and this is the key part, this is one of the real big skills that we do in class-- that we can integrate the feelings and stay present in our bodies, and then move forward in our lives with that felt sense of our own worth and goodness in spite of what happened.

This is important because what our students have experienced will be preserved in their bodies in such a way that it will come to the surface and lead to dysregulation. What we don't heal, we deal. So in class, we learn to deal with things. We get comfortable with the discomfort. That's a key idea-- we get comfortable with the discomfort. As one of my students said, rather than running from, or denying, or distracting, we learn to ride the lightning of our feelings. And I thought, that's a fabulous phrase, I'm going to steal that.

So there's another point here. What puts people in my room is the after-effect of the trauma. It's not the difficulty of the work. What passes for ADHD is often-- attention deficit hyperactivity disorder-- is often the fact that most folks can't bear to live in their own bodies. Most of my folks. The voltage is so permanently high that they are already dysregulated when they get to school. Why would we try to teach them English, or algebra, or anything else without first clearing the system to the best of our abilities. And the funny thing is, the clearing of the system is not this big gigantic event. It's actually a very simple thing that we do in the class on a regular basis, and everybody settles, and we move on with the day.

Finally, we usually define trauma in a familiar community context. How high would our numbers go if we considered the abuse, neglect that comes as the toll of systemic oppression? What does it mean when you are the person that the country hates? Where's your safe haven? I'd hope that one safe haven is the classroom.

So again, what makes the math hard is not the math itself. And to leave these roadblocks to learning untended undermines everyone's learning experience. And all my students are better students because we have compassionately attended these issues to the best of our abilities in the classroom the moment they arise. It's not about doing therapy. In fact that boundary is super, super well-defined. I have a whole set of resources that I refer out to for my folks. It's about letting people know that they know they matter no matter what. No matter the background, the history, or their record, frankly, they are welcomed, embraced, and treated like they matter. And I do this, not because I'm teaching them math. I do it because I'm teaching their soul. That's the thing that I'm after.

So these are the ACEs in my room. Students who drop out or are kicked out of school, end up in my class, have an average of somewhere around 7 out of 10 ACEs. From that list, my students average 7 out of 10. Can you imagine what it's like to have lived through 10 ACEs? What is your world like if you've lived through 10 ACEs? And what is it like to be asked to sit in your own skin when your heart has been broken that many times?

You may not know it, but I guarantee you, even if you're teaching advanced English in ESL program, or you're teaching something in the parent ed department, and you've got these fabulous parents who are doing really good things with their kids, I guarantee you that you've had these folks in your room. You may not have had as many as I have every single Monday, but you've had them. And I'm just going to ask that you start looking at life with a slightly different set of eyes.

A few years ago, I read the book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and the author was explaining that we have exactly the same hands, with exactly the same muscles, making exactly the same gestures as Da Vinci, and Michelangelo, and Frida Kahlo. We have exactly the same hands and exactly the same muscles doing exactly the same thing. How come our artwork doesn't look like their artwork?

Part of the reason is we haven't learned how to see. We haven't learned how to see the relationship between-- the gap between the eyes. The corner of the eye to the top of the ear, the width of the nose is exactly one eye space apart. We don't see the relationship between these items, and so we instead project our own imagination into there. We draw what we think we see instead of what we see. So what I want to encourage you guys to do is change the way you see your students. I'm going to ask that you start to see them like artists would see. And not to be overwhelmed by the scale of the task. You're going to eat an elephant, but I got to tell you, it works. I've got 1,000 plus graduates. And that's not because of me, personally. It's because of the way this material works. So I want you to have faith in that.

So this is a little chart that shows you that their enjoyment of school crashes, in the blue line, as the orange line starts to accelerate-- the year of their difficulties. That's the difficulties in the classroom, not the difficulties in life. And the year of the trauma is actually higher in their earlier years than it is in their later years, but it's persistent throughout. Just so that you'll know. Their drop year starts in the fifth grade and it ramps up. So they're even dropping with 15 minutes to go before they graduate.

This is their highest arc, this stretch right here. Which if you're in my room, you know that 99% of my students have dropped out between the end of their freshman year of high school and the second semester of their junior-- excuse me, sophomore year. That's like the core of my room. So difficulties increase, and the traumas actually decrease over time. But what's going on is that more stuff is stored in the body and there's less support. So the students don't give up until late. That means they have years of trying their best to be the good student. And there's actually an issue with this that we address in the classroom, where I have to counsel them to not be that good student because it's a response to distress in many cases and it will re-trigger them. We have to be able to see life a little bit more clearly.

But the real issue is that they don't have anyone showing up for them in a way that matches the scale of their need. They drop because of despair, not because of academics. But what would happen if we could eliminate the impact of this? And it's really relational. If we establish that one concerned, caring, individual relationship, that becomes a thing upon which people can hang their hat and then look for parallel experiences that match that.

So we change the narrative in my class. These are-- excuse me, the statistics. And again, this is adult ed, so you guys know how hard it is to pull statistics out of the field. It's really super challenging. California pass rate is 81%. US pass rate on GED is 79%. My students pass at a rate of 91%. So statistically significant outcomes. Comparable graduation rates. 14% on average, regional's about 12%, we're doing 30% graduation rate. So it's nitty gritty stuff, guys. It's really practical. And it's down and dirty. It's thing that we say we're all about in education is getting people educated as well as graduated, and they're both in this system.

A confession that I have to make, though, is that when I first started the job years ago, I still had a really high graduation rate back in the day, but the problem was I'd turn on the TV and I'd see my students getting stuck into the back of a cop car on the evening news. Or I'd open up a newspaper and I'd read about them in the headlines. Or I'd-- somebody else would report, hey, I saw so-and-so, they were picking through a trash can on South Main. And it would be absolutely heartbreaking. It would be devastating because we'd be doing all this great work, and still there was something that was missing.

And what I realized is that it was relational. And when folks were leaving the class, they had not been able to take that pattern of relationships with them and apply it in the outside world. So we had to raise that up, raise up our game in terms of dealing with self-worth versus self-esteem, et cetera, and what connectedness was all about.

I'm not going to belabor this. I want to draw your eyes to the three red points. These are soft skills surveys that I do with my students and they're on a 0 to 5 scale, before and after. Number one, my comfort level with studying. Well before they come to class, it's a 1.8. After they leave class, on a scale of 0 to 5, it's a 4.2. So that sets the stage. My ability to make choices for my future that reflect my self-worth goes from a 1.9 to a 4.6. And that's why we don't see the recidivism rate afterwards. Because they now are making choices that reflect their self-worth. My eagerness to attend school goes up to a 4.5. And my belief that I can go to college goes from a 1.6 to a 4.7.

So we're not talking about grades with this one. We're talking about how one feels about school, which is really the proxy for how one feels about him or herself. The academics get measured on the previous slide, in terms of outcomes, graduation, transition to college, and retention. How long we have people in the room. And just so you guys will know, we're purely digital. I'm 100% digital now, and class is still packed because people care about each other. They miss each other when we shut down. So we're on. We're on.

It's an internal investment that has very external results. Here are just a few of them. These make me really happy. Phi Beta Kappa and honors grads at Hartnell Community College, bio-chemists and bio-physicists at UCSC, teachers at CSUMB-- my substitutes have been my own students-- teachers aides, EMTs, police officers, loan brokers, real estate agents. When we go to the doctor, my wife and I, my students are always jabbing me with a needle, saying, hey, Tim, remember that algebra you taught me?

We have several debt-free homeowners, where they've paid off their houses because of a percents lesson that we had in class. Many of them, actually. We have seen people become really great parents, and really great parents whose own kids are going to college. And I have to say this one-- legendary full-ride scholarship, best scholarship I've ever seen in my life, to Santa Clara University to study law. She just graduated in June. Her hands were stained with strawberry juice from picking in the fields, morning to night, when I met her.

So we're going to understand that motivation. And I'll show you a little bit of a progression. And I'm going to go through this really quickly because I want to be attentive to time. And it's going to show you the difference between chaos and success. These are going to be little scenarios, and they're about one or two sentences each. Imagine your student coming into the classroom.

Scenario number one, hi, oh, wait a minute, that's my phone. I hate when that happens. Did I bring my pencil? Scenario one. Scenario two, hi, did you see the news yesterday? It's crazy out there! I saw this thing about New York, COVID. Scenario three, I'm having a bad day. I have so much to do and this COVID thing is really stressful. Good thing I have my chocolate milk. Good thing I have my potato chips. And you guys can insert any distraction. Often, the one with the thumbs that acts as a soothing mechanism. Number four, hi, I'm angry. There was someone who had sniffles and they weren't wearing a mask when I was at the store. Number five, hey, can I take a minute to tell you how I feel? I'm feeling a little angry and a little sad, too.

So did you guys notice the difference between number four and number five? It went from I am angry to I feel angry. With "I am angry," that's when I'm blended with the experience. I'm fully immersed in it. Whereas when I use the language "I feel angry," I've taken a little bit of a step back and I'm closer to regulation than I am to dysregulation.

Number six, can I have a minute to tell you how I feel? There's some parts of me that feel angry and some parts that feel sad, and some powerless, and some that are really just tired from all of this stuff. They're all in there. And I know that some are about right now and some are from my past. So in this example, I'm aware of multiple feelings that are happening all at once within myself, not just one thing. So little less blending, even there.

Number seven, this is the last one. Hi, oh, I'm so glad you're here. This is work, but I think I've got it, and I feel like together we've got this. In the last scenario, I'm still feeling a little distress, but the sense of connection has helped to build feelings of confidence and safety, and the work can get done. So now you can see that progression from a state that's really not present when they first come in, and not able to feel what's going on, to a little bit more feeling, and a little more feeling, and then finally to a state of presence and an ability to be connected to others.

Same student. Day one is the first example. Day 60 is the second example. It goes from a powerless state to a more powerful state. Its powerful, yet humble, because in the last one, they can ask for help. So can you imagine what it feels like to know that with effort, you can effect change. That's powerful. And to have faith that if you need some help, someone will be there. That's true humility. And this is where hope comes from. I can do what I can do, and if I can't do it, then I can ask somebody. And they can help me through this process and together we can tackle this thing. That's really hopeful and it's not magic. It's just work. It takes time, but there's a process.

So there's a bit for us. This idea from Alice Miller is crazy important and I'm going to read it to you. "The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and our conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth."

So everything gets stored in the body. Let me say this the right way. The negative stuff gets stored in the body. Good experiences don't get stored as much because they are not as critical for survival. They're stored, but we don't recycle them as much because we don't have to worry about them. Whereas bad experiences, the body's built to store them and hang on to them because it's worried about surviving in the future. And this is something that we have to be careful about as teachers because it will often not only impact how we share stuff with our students, but also what we share with our students. I don't want to give them a bad experience that gets stored in their bodies.

So we're going to try a little magic here. I'm going to try a video for you and hopefully this is going to work this time. There we go. Let's back that up just a little bit.

Babies this young are extremely responsive to the emotions, and the reactivity, and the social interaction that they get from the world around them. This is something that we started studying, oh, 34 years ago, when people didn't think that infants could engage in social interaction.

[baby crying]

In the "Still Face" experiment, what the mother did was, she sits down and she's playing with her baby, who's about a year of age.

Are you my good girl? Oh, yes.

And she gives a greeting to the baby. The baby gives a greeting back to her.

Oh, yes.

Yeah.

This baby starts pointing at different places in the world, and then the mother is trying to engage her and play with her. They're working to coordinate their emotions and their intentions, what they want to do in the world. And that's really what the baby is used to.

And then we ask the mother to not respond to the baby. The baby very quickly picks up on this, and then she uses her abilities to try and get the mother back. She smiles at the mother, she points because she's used to the mother looking where she points.

[baby babbles]

The baby puts both hands up in front of her and says, what's happening here?

[baby fussing]

She makes that screechy sound at the mother, like, come on, why aren't we doing this?

[baby fussing]

Even in this 2 minutes, when they don't get the normal reaction, they react with negative emotions. They turn away, they feel the stress of it, they actually may lose control of their posture because of the stress that they're experiencing.

[baby crying]

OK. It's OK. I'm here. And what are you doing? Oh, yes. Oh, what a big girl.

It's a little like the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good is that normal stuff that goes on that we all do with our kids. The bad is when something bad happens, but the infant can overcome it. After all, when you stop the still face, the mother and the baby start to play again. The ugly is when you don't give the child any chance to get back to the good. There's no reparation. And they're stuck in that really ugly situation.

All right. So did you notice how, in this scenario, the mother was not violent, or drunk, or loud, and the baby still suffered? We often think that trauma must be very dramatic, like the ACEs list, for it to have an effect on memory, but that's not the case. Researchers have discovered that four-month-old infants, when exposed to the still face experiment two weeks later, will show fast changes in their body that were not even present during the first round. This is for babies who cannot speak. Their hearts will beat faster and their blood will show stress hormones, like cortisol. And it means that their bodies can remember even though the babies can't speak about it. The change can actually last for years. And if it is from strong enough trauma, it will even affect brain development. A child's brain that has been neglected or abused will have fewer connections between brain cells.

So I want you to think back to the ACEs. Imagine your class sitting out in front of you and imagine what it's like to try to teach the folks that you're working with without knowing what their back stories are. And we're wondering why we can't get it. So we don't need the vicious details, the ugly details. What we need to know is that folks have suffered quite often and that's really the issue that we're dealing with when somebody is not quote unquote, "getting it" right in front of us.

We're built for that attachment and when we don't get it, it registers as an injury. So I want you to imagine what it's like when we've flipped things around in the classroom, and the classroom has become about me as the instructor instead of about my students. So when I'm trying to get my testing done-- my CASAS testing to please my boss, or the state funders, or consortium, or whoever it may be-- how do I turn that in some way that my students can actually see that their needs are going to be met in this experience, and that it's not just about the distress that I feel about having to do this test yet again, and it's interfering with my curriculum? What happens when I've had a bad day at home, and I show up on the job, and I can't have a face that reacts to this person who's sitting right in front of me?

And if you guys know anything about Maslow's pyramid, the terms of the hierarchy of needs, you don't run out of these needs just because you got older. Now technically, you're supposed to be better at providing them for yourself, but if you never had anybody who showed you the pattern of how to provide for your own needs in a healthy way, you're not going to know how to do it when you get to be an adult. So when we're dealing with folks for whom connection is a rarity, it's something that we have to really be aware of. Yeah. Because it has a huge impact on what occurs inside the classroom. By the way, just so you guys will know, when I teach at work, I'm often teaching exactly what I'm teaching you guys right now. We do a whole social studies lesson around this, and so they get the vocabulary.

So we're going to do a little bit about the second big idea, which is understanding our intention. And I'm going to read this to you because we're not going have time to do the activity. This is one of the activities we do in the 12-hour workshop, where I tell people I want you guys to do the little name tag, speed dating kind of thing that we may have seen on television, except we're going to do it like this-- what is one neutral word that you would to describe-- you would use to describe yourself?

And now consider this question-- what do you believe might happen if you stopped being that way or stopped doing that? Sit with it for a moment. Slow your beating down and drop into the body. And ask again. What do you believe might happen if you stopped? Then slow the pacing down a little bit more and ask again. And then what would happen? Take one more deep breath and ask at the final level-- and then what might happen? Then I have them write one brief statement to answer that question that the image manager part of our identity controls. What is the answer to what do you believe might happen if you stopped?