Teaching Tip Tuesday: Put Some Stank on It

Cough cough…sputter….sputter…what’s this? Ah yes, the return of Teaching Tip Tuesday!* For those just joining, this is a chance for all you lovely people to submit a link to your blog postings that you think will help teachers and parents and mental health professionals work better with children.

Today’s example comes from when I joined a Hip Hop dance performing troupe a few years ago.** I was super stressed out from my job, and needed an outlet. What better way to relieve stress than to exercise and challenge myself to use an unused part of my brain? I was so focused on trying to coordinate complex moves, get over my fear of looking like a lame white girl with no rhythm, and meet a new group of people. And that was just what I needed. For a few hours a week, I didn’t think about how there were way too many kids on my caseload, way too many crises, and not enough time to do my job as a school psychologist in my urban public schools.

I have a dance background. I was one of those kids who took tap, jazz, ballet, funk, hip hop, cheerleading, circus (really), and gymnastics and wanted more. I hadn’t danced in a while though, and somehow I suspected that the “robot” was no longer cool in hip hop.*** Anyhoo, I auditioned and made the team as an “alternate” meaning I could train with these professional dancers.

I worked my a** off trying to keep up, lost 15 pounds in the process, and then totally hit a wall and was not progressing. I even got the “Most Improved!” award, which we in education all know means “You suck just a little less than just a month ago!” We had these “Feedback” sessions in which you would perform in front of the other members of the troupe and each person would tell you what you were doing well and what you needed to work on. Well, after performing a classic piece to E-40, the head dancer gave me the following feedback:

“You’re a good dancer, but you need to put some stank on it.”

Right. Some stank. I’ll get right on th…wait? What?

The feedback was clearly not specific enough for me to do anything with it. Did she mean my facial expressions should be more stanky? Should I hit the moves harder? Lower? Faster? Not shower? WHAT?

And this is the problem with general feedback. Students don’t know what to do with it. When I was at Berkeley, my advisor once told me, “This is the worst dissertation prospectus I’ve ever seen in my 30 years at Berkeley”. NOT HELPFUL. Now if she said, “I am concerned about your Methods section and we need to rework your statistical analyses,” I would have known what to do. So as you go about your day working with kids, remember that specific feedback (and specific praise, for that matter) are much more useful for getting a kid to change his or her behavior. Even “Good job” or worse yet, “Good boy!” is far less helpful than “I like how you used a topic sentence.” Then the kid knows what was good about the performance.

And here’s the fun part. Good, specific feedback alone can change behavior. It’s like those speed monitors they sometimes put on roads where people speed, that let you know you are going 37 miles per hour in a 25 mile hour zone. What is your instinct when you get that specific feedback? You slow down. Now imagine it said, “You’re doing it wrong!” You wouldn’t know what to do.

One final point: always try to sandwich negative feedback in between two layers of positive feedback. If I were that head dancer, I could have said:

I like how you made a stanky face when you hit that move so hard. Now I want you to take that same attitude during other moves, because you look like a cheerleader. Don’t hit the moves so stiffly, loosen up.

Now that’s good feedback.


*I know it’s Wednesday. Shhhhhhhh.
**Perfectly normal thing to do.
***It actually has made quite the comeback. I could have been the first to revive the retro coolness of it.

Crisis Management

I promise we will return to our regularly-scheduled blog about education, psychology, and all my little friends in the public schools after this last wedding post. I'm back from the most amazing wedding and honeymoon, and have been sloooooowly returning to civilian life. It's weird, at work, no one wants to hug me, take my photo, tell me how beautiful I look, and give me a gift for being in love, like at the wedding. Weird.

I am compelled to write one last post about the wedding, especially since the last one gave the impression that it was all smooth sailing. And as my kids say, I'm keeping it real. So, you know those shows where the bride freaks out over a miniscule detail and you roll your eyes at how lame she is? Well, I finally get it. I was that bride for a moment. I am somewhat ashamed to admit this, since my work as a school psychologist should have MORE than prepared me for any wedding crisis, great or small. In my work in urban public schools, I have dealt with the following crises:

-Female teacher being arrested for sleeping with one of my 8th grade students
-Drive-by shooting of school
-Police shoot-outs in front of school yard of students
-Multiple bomb threats (by PARENTS of the school, mind you)
-Stray cat population with ringworm invading school on state testing day
-And so much more...

So one would think I could handle an itty-bitty wedding crisis. Especially since I was Bride-chilla), right?

Well the problem was, I didn't take the advice that I usually give out to others about not taking on too many things at once. So in addition to planning a 3-day destination wedding, I also foolishly selected the weekend before said blessed event to take the final board certification exam to be a clinical psychologist. This is essentially the Bar Exam for psychologists, which is the final, final, little flag we have to plant on our mountainous journey from Educational Psychologist (specializing in school-related problems) to Clinical Psychologist (specializing in any problem, for any age). And if I didn't pass the exam, I would have to wait another 6 months to take it. No pressure. The good news is, I passed! Then, I had the rest of my week to simply run around town doing everything else for the wedding. I was in good shape. Or so I thought.

Three days before the wedding, I went to the bridal store to pick up my gorgeous gown, on the way to picking up the rings, meeting fiance for final dance lesson, and packing for the wedding and honeymoon. I was on a military-precision time-line. Picking up the dress was the fun part! And yet, when they opened up the bag to show me my dress, I had my one and only bridal melt-down, Bridezilla-style.

There was a spot on my dress.

I know, not that big of a deal, right? WRONG. I apparently hadn't been following my own advice and had been bottling up all my stress, because I just burst into tears.* The bridal staff moved into Defcon 2 mode and started talking into their wrists all secret-service style, "Um, we got a 210 in progress--crying bride. Go! Go! Go!" They mobilized the platoon of staff around me and the dress, got out the tissues and the haz-mat-style gloves and began the inspection as I sobbed. Every solution they offered was not acceptable. They offered to try to get it out further, but there was no guarantee that it wouldn't make it worse. They offered to try to sew a fold over the spot in a way that fit the style, but that would have taken time and potentially gone horribly wrong. I said, sarcastically through tears, "why don't we just iron on a jean-patch on my designer dress if we're going to do that!" Keep in mind, this was a minuscule little spot, but all my stress morphed into that spot, staring at me with it's .01% imperfection. Sure, 99.99% of everything else was going well, but I couldn't mobilize my crisis management skills and left the shop in tears.

I managed to get to my dance lesson and collapsed into fiance's arms, but when I started telling my story of trauma, it became clear that it wasn't about the spot. It was about dealing with imperfection on a day that I wanted to be perfect. On the actual day, I couldn't even really find the spot again, perhaps it was a stress mirage. In any event, I survived the great spot crisis of 2009, and the wedding went perfectly. I can't even put into words how amazing it felt to see all the hard work pay off into a beautiful day of love and happiness with friends and family. Okay, maybe I can put it into words, but no without sounding like a big cheezeball. And for future brides, or anyone going through several life transitions at a time, do as I say, and not as I do:

1) Rely on your friends and family. Delegate the things you don't really need to be doing yourself. It's hard if you tend toward perfectionism. But trust me, you can't do it all yourself.

2) Remember, at the end of the day, no one will remember if you had roses or tulips, or the small details. They'll remember how happy you were to be getting married. Say to yourself, "All I need is an officiant and my partner, the rest doesn't matter." And as my friend said, "And if the officiant doesn't show up, I'm sure someone can get their internet reverend credentials on their iPhones real quick."

3) Don't put too much on your plate at once. Confucius once said, "You cannot go in all directions at once." Smart guy.

4) Helping professionals: don't be afraid to be HELPED. People like to help. You like to help, right? So do others.

5) Express your stress and continue to utilize your coping skills during stressful times, especially exercise. Even if it is a 20 minute walk. You'll tell yourself you don't have time. C'mon. You have 20 minutes.

6) Elope. Just kidding.


*It reminds me of the first time I cried at work. My principal had never seen me lose it before and she was so surprised and didn't know what to do. My fellow counselor friend just clapped her hands and squealed, "Yea! She's human!" If you want to be a school psychologist, be prepared to check your perfectionism at the door. It's a messy field. Took me YEARS to figure that out. Years.