Training Hodgepodge No 18 – August 7th, 2020 ***************************************************************************************** Unsung Heroes: Quote of the Week Teaching teachers “Before you marry a person, you should fist make them Christopher Emdin believes hip-hop can make use a computer with very slow internet to see who they better teachers. Emdin, an associate professor at really are.” W. Ferrell Columbia University’s Teachers College, has spent more than a decade working to bridge the cultural Movie Recommendations: divide between teachers and students, especially Drivways (2020) when the teaching workforce fails to reflect student “For a movie about isolation and the risk of reaching out, diversity. The author of For White Folks Who Teach it's a generous example of how nourishing a sense of in the Hood….and Rest of Y’all Too, Emdin wants connection really is”. (Rolling Stone). I love these hidden teachers to engage with students “on their own gems that no one’s heard of, where you take a chance cultural turf”, and he launched the #HipHopEd based on the good reviews (100% favorable from the initiative to get teachers to incorporate hip-hop into Rotten Tomatoes website), not even knowing what the their lessons. The goal is to transform how teachers movie is all about, and it pays off remarkably. It is just a good story with believable people you cheer for. engage with young people and how students submitted by Brian Conheady engage with their education as a result.

”The system, as it exists, just doesn’t do well for a vast majority of young people,” he says. “We just Book Recommendation: have to change it.” -Katie Reilly Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi I had read this fascinating book a couple of years ago Civic Duty and it was mentioned in a recent article regarding the Grief makes many people turn inward. Others, like ability of a good book to give the reader insight into Kassy Alia Ray, use their pain to open up. Ray’s late understanding different perspectives. The author traces husband Greg Alia was a police officer killed in the the parallel paths of two sisters, each unaware of each line of duty in 2015 in Columbia, S.C. At that time other, living in different African villages in the 1800s. debates about police brutality dominated headlines. One is taken into slavery and one is left behind. Their Ray, a community psychologist, decided to work on paths are followed through 8 generations, detailing easing the tension that can be fatal to both officers how random circumstances can influence, both who we and those they’re meant to protect. Since 2018, her are, and who we become in the future. nonprofit Serve and Connect has done the complex submitted by Brian Conheady work of building trust between the two groups – for example outfitting officers with some 40,000 meals to give to food-insecure families they encounter on Riddle the job. “Issues like hunger and poverty are really at How high would you have to go before you would use the root of a lot of things,” she says. -Katy Steinmetz the letter “A” in the English language spelling of a whole number?

Silly Humor From last week: Mr. and Mrs. Mustard have 6 daughters and each daughter has 1 brother. How many Q. Where did the King keep his armies? people are in the Mustard family? A. Up his sleevies Answer: Nine

Live, In-person Training Starts • Active listening can be healing intervention. This week I have returned to presenting open • Sometimes what a person doesn’t say is as community trainings at 111 Westfall for reduced-size important as what they do say. groups (13 max), and with CDC safety measures in Principles of Family/Youth Engagement: place. I have listed below all the trainings that will be • Your own feelings, behaviors, and experiences available with key concepts highlighted specific to each can be a help or a barrier to your interactions training: and relationships with other people. Self Awareness: • It is more important to focus on strengths than • Sometimes the biggest barrier we encounter deficits. when engaging with others, is ourselves. • Empowerment is enhanced by our ability to be • Critical thinking, the ability to move past our curious and to “learn-with” the family/youth. default positions and to look at behavior from Compassion Fatigue: multiple angles, is a key to being successful in • Trauma and stress symptoms can be “catchy”. both our professional and personal lives. • We do not do our best thinking when we are • Who you are today is a combination of who chronically stressed. you’ve been, and who you want to be. • Self -care is essential to being successful. Overview of Emotional Trauma: Processing Trauma Events: • Most everyone has experienced trauma, but our • How are you feeling now? responses to trauma can vary dramatically. • Has the event changed you personally? • Trauma and ongoing stress can change brain • Has the event changed you professionally? functioning. Whose Kids Are These-Abuse, Neglect… • Sometimes the most important thing you can do • Slaves, women, and children have had a history for someone suffering from the pain of trauma of being, legally, someone else’s property. is to just “be there” for them. • Parents have more leeway in what they can do Diversity, Values and Decision Making: with their kids than teachers, care workers, etc. • Being treated “lesser than” at some time in your • They are not your children. life seems to be a universal experience. So You Want To Be A Leader: • We are all guilty of making unfair assumptions • Some of the important characteristics that you about other people. would want in a leader are not teachable. • Sometimes “group-think” can lead us to do • Being given the title of “leader”, does not things that we would not normally do. necessarily make you a leader. Functional Behavioral Approach: • Leaders role-model expected behaviors. • Youth (and adults) will do well when they can. Labels: Helpful or Hurtful: When they are not doing well, we look at • Labels can hurt. possible trauma, unmet needs or skill deficits as • While some labels can help explain behaviors, the cause. they can also dehumanize people. • “ Why would someone act this way?” • Labels can lead to harmful power differentials • Your interpretation guides your intervention. Professional Boundaries: General Guidelines for Limit Setting with Youth • Disclosure of personal information to youth, • Teaching values to youth is best done within the families and our colleagues should be a context of a positive, caring relationship. thoughtful process and dependent on our • An underdeveloped frontal cortex can explain a answer to the question – Whose need is it? lot of the behaviors you see with teens. • There should be a balance between your • Adults need to role model expectations. personal and professional lives. Constructive Feedback/Active Listening: • A good work environment depends on workers • Quality improves in organizations that promote maintaining a professional demeaner. honest conversations at all levels. The Education Starts A Good Story It starts when you’re very young. You start noticing Whenever I ask a group of people what they do to find things – the people around you, the pictures in your relief from stress, someone always mentions music. room, the toys you get, the celebrations you have. You This story, sent in by Cindy Cannon, shows the power of gradually learn to understand words, and that some the beat in an unusual way. It’s also about how the words are used when people are happy, and others wisdom of one person can help others. See link below: used when people are upset. You are told not to use https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/nyregion/milford- “bad” words but some of the people around you use graves-drummer.html them. You start to notice the people outside the home, your relatives and the people who live on your street. Random Thoughts The kids on the street look like you. You learn that the • Earth is like a person who knows exactly where to boys have the same toys you have, and the girls have stand next to a bonfire. their own toys. You learn that you’re not supposed to • Growing up, my family made fun of me at the play with “girl toys”. You go to church and everyone dinner table because I would smell the food before looks like you. You start to understand that God is a eating it. They thought it was odd, but I knew I male, our father. At home, you begin to understand couldn’t trust them. CK some of the adult conversation at home and they talk • When I was working with little kids in a residential about bad people on the news or in the paper. You setting, one of the activities I did that they loved learn to not talk to strangers - that a bad person could was playing hide and seek in the dark. We would kidnap you. You start to go to school. Most of the kids play outside and I was always “it”, and I would tell and the teacher look like you. Some kids look different. them to find the best hiding spots and stay there You still play with them all. You notice that there are because I was really good at finding kids. So they pictures of Presidents on the wall. They are all men. would all take off and I would start counting, very At home you ask your parents why your street doesn’t loud, so they could all hear, and when I got to 50, I have any of the kids that you see in school…the ones would yell “Here I come”, and then I would just lay that are different from you. You are told that those kids down on the nearby picnic table and look up at the live in their own neighborhood. When you ask if you stars. Every 5 minutes or so, I would yell out “I’m could visit a friend in another neighborhood, your getting closer” but had no intent to leave the picnic parents tell you that you should stay in your own table. After about 30 minutes, I would yell “I give neighborhood because the neighborhood that your up” and they would all leave their spots and come friend lives in is not safe. As you grow older, you learn in and I would praise them for finding such good that some people make fun of people who look hiding places and asked if they wanted to try again. differently than them. You hear jokes and you laugh. They always did. It was a win-win. I didn’t do much Your parents say that you should be respectful to but they felt like they were the best hiders in the everyone, but you hear them say that other people are world. lazy and don’t work as hard as they should. Some of Humorous your friends are mean to other kids. Kids that are Q. Why don’t ants get the coronavirus? different. They fight. They say if you don’t fight, those A. Because they have antibodies. other kids will just beat you up. You start to feel safer Final Quote being around those who look like you. “It’s common for babies to fall asleep and wake up You’re 12 years old. You’ve learned a lot, and your in different locations, but as an adult, the idea of education will continue. that happening is terrifying “

NEXT PAGES: • New game to activate your frontal cortex • Answers to last week’s game

FICTIONARY – match the words with their “crazy” definitions: August 2020

1. what happens to an illegally parked frog a) paradise 2. a very large rental company b) overstuffed recliner 3. a bad hotel c) campus 4. Cow with only 2 legs d) symphony 5. the science of opening your mouth and putting your foot in it e) chiropractor 6. a dead or missing parrot f) arrays 7. to travel to and from work without speaking g) megahertz 8. Too far to see h) tangent 9. annoying person moving slowly and aimlessly in front of you i) chirpes 10. mom’s nickname for dad j) Mooses 11. a canarial disease, no tweetment k) toad 12. another name for Triton, Poseidon or Neptune l) commute 13. Hebrew prophet who parted the Maine woods m) lean beef 14. show us where to pitch our tent n) violin 15. two cubes with dots on them o) meanderthal 16. one who corrects a wrong p) seeking 17. a reasonable way to go q) polygon 18. a man who has been in the sun r) writer 19. an Egyptian doctor s) pulpit 20. pretending to feel sad for someone t) pasteurize 21. a large hole in the ground where tug-o-war is played u) dentopedology 22. what you demand from your boss v) pathological

I DO…and I do….and I do - Answers from Last Week How many times have the following celebrities been married? 1. Johnny Depp 2 2. Leonardo DiCaprio 1 3. Brad Pitt 2 4. Will Smith 2 5. Robert DeNiro 2 6. Al Pacino 0 7. Angelina Jolie 3 8. Jennifer Lopez 3 9. Jeff Bridges 1 10. Dwayne Johnson 2 11. Elizabeth Taylor 8 12. Tom Cruise 3 13. Chris Rock 1 14. Neil Patrick Harris 1 15. Dolly Parton 1 16. Ellen DeGeneres 1 17. Ron Howard 1 18. Denzel Washington 1 19. Beyonce 1 20. Robin Williams 3 21. Tom Hanks 2 22. Spike Lee 1 23. Halle Berry 3 24. Billy Crystal 1 25. Mariah Carey 2