While studying the biology of the brain over this past semester I often wondered how I could use this newly acquired knowledge in my everyday activities as a teacher. There have certainly been some valuable insights into the emotional nature of students and I feel that this will be most helpful to me not only as I create lesson plans but also as I guide student learning. So often during my student teaching I was forced to deal with emotional wrought students without any insight into the reasons behind their behavior. I wrote off most of it as childishness and this somewhat alleviated me of even having to deal with it. When a student acted out in class or refused to complete work, I would chastise them the same way I would some class clown who actively disrupted class in order to get attention. In retrospect, having read chapters by both Zadina and Zull on the nature of emotion and its impact on learning, I can imagine the necessity of several strategies when dealing with these types of situations in the future.

I realize this was the topic of discussion several weeks ago, but I’ve been thinking of it recently as I’ve been completing many interviews. I have been asked about my management plan as well as my classroom plans should I be hired and I always think about the emotional issues of my potential students. The relationship between the teacher and student should be such that the teacher can “read” the student and his/her emotional response on a day-to-day, class-to-class basis. There are many ways in which this can occur (it seems to me). The best and most efficient way I think it to simply maintain an open dialogue with students. Although I have had much time to think this through over the past several weeks since the end of my student teaching, when I was in charge of the classroom, the first thing I did was ask how everyone was. I attempted to engage the class in a small discussion at the beginning of each class, sometimes wholly unrelated to the topic or activity that day. I was trying to loosen them up. Zadina might say I was practicing something like “positive psychology,” reducing anxiety within my class, creating an environment suitable for maximum engagement with the content of that lesson. As She writes in ch.3 of Multiple Pathways, “emotions can affect thinking, memory, attention, and therefore learning” (64). It all ties together. And I think that really, most issues having to do with the brain seem to affect learning. Emotion seems little different than social structures. Is social anxiety that dissimilar from testing anxiety. I can remember both from when I was a young student and I would be hard pressed to explain the difference. Negative social situations at school such as bullying and rejection can register with the brain as actual, physical pain and therefore cause serious problems in the classroom (Zadina 192). For this reason, I think it’s important to maintain an air of positivity, the air of positive psychology, a positive environment that rewards good behavior more so than it punishes bad behavior. At least, I have explained as much in those aforementioned interviews.