Think about it this way. If you’re driving down the road and you see the car begin to veer off the edge of the road, you’ll take steps to correct the direction of the car. But what if your eyes “told” you that the car was still in the middle of the lane? You would be likely to resist anyone telling you to change what you’re doing, and in fact you might get pretty upset if that person kept insisting that you were headed in the wrong direction. Many of the students have poor “emotional vision” in the best circumstances, and it’s even worse when they’re under stress.
Anticipating Stress
We try to address this issue in two basic ways. The first goal is to strengthen each student’s ability to anticipate and perceive stress as it begins to occur. We want a student to be able to say, for example, “I get uncomfortable when I have unstructured time and lunch time is coming up soon so I better get ready.” For students who often live in the moment, this is a big challenge. If I could magically give every student one ability instantly, I think it might be the ability to anticipate future events and their associated feelings. This is hard for lots of kids because of difficulties they may have in sequencing ideas, in rapidly processing information, and in holding ideas in their heads (working memory). To strengthen these skills, we do lots of activities that require sequencing (as several students are doing with photos in Photography class) and rapid back-and-forth information processing (as the whole group did on the trail playing “Human Scavenger Hunt,” trying to identify specific people with verbal clues).
Dealing with Stress
The second goal is to strengthen each student’s ability to take steps to calm and regulate himself when he is anxious. In addition to knowing when he is actually anxious, a student must have some ways of dealing with the stress. For a student who has language processing difficulties, it might be hard to say to someone else, “I’m feeling anxious now because I don’t know how to do this work.” But, it might be easier for them to get up and walk around, or take a short break, or even give some kind of nonverbal signal to an adult. With this student, we will coax reflective language while we also support his use of the nonverbal, motoric strategies. For a student who has visuospatial difficulties and/or motor planning issues, it might be hard to separate from others when he is getting upset, as he may become rooted to one spot and over-rely on aggressive, demanding language-based strategies to try to calm himself. But, it might be possible to engage in soothing interactions with this student that don’t add to the language overload; these interactions might involve an overall reduction in sensory stimulation, a calming voice, and gentle support in coaxing the student to walk around or take a break.
In the service of the first goal, we will almost always revisit these difficult events to try to help each student process what happened and anticipate its recurrence. Sometimes students don’t want to go there. It’s over, they say, and I don’t want to talk about it. We push them on this point, but never force them.
