Teaching Empathy

As a teacher of English I believe strongly in teaching soft skills to students: the cluster of personality traits, social graces, communication, language, personal habits, interpersonal skills that characterise relationships with others. A huge part of this involves empathy: the capacity to understand what someone else is thinking, feeling, experiencing.

Working in an area of high deprivation, low aspiration and low socio-economic status families has its challenges – none so challenging as students’ ability to empathise with each other.

A prime example of this is the constant calling to attention of others’ weaknesses. When students are experiencing anxiety or panic, many other students will call this to the attention of large groups of individuals thus turning attention to an individual who clearly does not want to be the focus of a large number of individuals.

So often, in instances in which this occurs, teachers ignore this and try to move past it without so much as a comment on why this act is one of cruelty. In other cases, teachers will reprimand perpetrators with a glare or a stern word (treating that individual as if they are have done something wrong – without clarifying what they have done). How, then, is a child to know exactly why they have been reprimanded?

I strongly believe that by communicating clear social expectations in a non-aggressive manner to students, they are able to process why their actions may be harmful to others. The aggression shown by many teachers in the profession, perhaps as a way of instilling their authortity, allows students to react in a negative fashion towards them. Thus taking validity away from their argumentation. In fact, it is clearly observable that individuals learn best from people they like, trust and respect.

The best way to teach soft skills, then, is to model them. By explaining clearly and in a non-aggressive way, a teacher is modelling respect, kindness and empathy. By treating a child like they have done something terrible when in fact they have acted out of ignorance only serves to perpetuate a culture in which soft skills are not learnt and individuals do not grow spiritually. How can students learn to manage relationships if they have no role-models modelling these behaviours to them?

It is not simply the responsility of one person to raise a child, but the responsibility of every individual who is in a position to impact upon their lives. As adults, we are looked up to, regardless of whether we want to be or not, and it is our responsibility to model love, kindness, respect, empathy and all soft skills we wish to see in others.

So, imagine a world where problems facing people who happen to have black skin aren’t a grim reality. Imagine a world where people who happen to have black skin have equal opportunities. Imagine a world where people who happen to have black skin arren’t stereotyped because of something as simple as, oh I don’t know… the colour of their skin. It is blindingly obvious that people should treat each other respectfully; this is not a game of chess where one colour must defeat another for supremacy – there is room on this board for everybody.

Too many people think that the world will never change! People forget that one-hundred years ago people who happened to have black skin were forced to live separately from white people. People forget the struggles that families who happened to have black skin were forced to undergo: trying to find work, trying to avoid violence, trying to live life.

The world is changing! America has its first black president – Barack Obama. Sadly, this isn’t enough. More change is still desperately needed… On August 9^th 2014, Michael Brown – an unarmed 18-year-old – was shot and killed by a white policeman. In the same year, Daniel Pantaleo – a police officer involved in the death of Eric Garner – was not arrested, even though he admitted to choking his victim to death.  In order to further improve issues surrounding racism we must improve the following things:

• The attitudes of the police need to change – not all young black men are in gangs, violent drug addicts or rapists; they’re just human beings trying to live their life.
• We must educate young people, so they understand that blindly stereotyping is an awful crime.
• We must ensure that crimes committed by white people and black people receive the same treatment in a court of law (think about possession charges and who they affect most).
• We must show the next generation how to treat our fellow man!

Violence towards black people is an atrocious crime. Are people not aware they are the same as us? Are people not aware they are human? Are people not aware they are people? I have to say that we need to move away from situations where black individuals take the blame for things. A shocking example of this, from the novel ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is when Tom Robinson – an innocent black man – is executed for a crime he didn’t commit. Clearly, the message in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is one that we should remember and value: there shouldn’t be a difference between black and white. Simply put: the only thing we need to change is ourselves.

Abusive relationships

I recently overheard a 15 year old girl mention that her boyfriend doesn’t let her socialise with male friends; perhaps he is the jealous type.

This got me thinking: is such an expectation abusive?

The obvious answer is no; he is not causing her any direct harm and is only specifying his preferences – perhaps he doesn’t trust his male friends.

On the other hand, it seems quite unfair to expect his female partner to follow such stringent expectations on the assumption that he cannot trust his friends. More to the point, the obvious implication here is that he does not trust her. The problem here is that his mistrust is surely misplaced; she is to be trusted – surely a relationship in which trust is not a fundamental factor is a relationship strewn with issues.

In any case, the point I am trying to make here is that relationships in which one party expects unreasonable sacrifices on a social and/or emotional level are relationships that should not be entered into. If this young man cannot accept that his girlfriend is going to have friends – regardless of their biological sex – and he is unwilling to allow her to socialise with them, then he is limiting her social functionality.

The fact she is considering staying with this person makes me think her self-esteem is pretty low; she is willing to sacrifice everything socially in order to conform to his needs and to meet her own needs of acceptance (of feeling conventionally secure within a relationship). In this case, it could be argued that he is exploiting her social insecurities to validate himself – perhaps in an attempt to consolidate his own social insecurities.

Is it fair to pin these expectations on people? If you really loved someone wouldn’t you trust them with your ‘friends’? Wouldn’t you trust your friends?

An analysis of masculine speech styles

I underook some research, setting out to investigate the linguistic behaviour of a group of young men with the aim of evaluating the differences in their displays of masculine identity depending on their audience: all-male cohorts or mixed-sex cohorts.

The research has shown that linguistic features used to represent the dominance of heterosexual males at face value, such as sexual references, the objectification of women and the denigration of homosexuality, are used dramatically less, 59.9%, 100% and 47.7% respectively, in the speech of male speakers when a female participant is present, and that the rate with which expletives are used declines, by 68.42%, as well.

Changes of this nature may reflect a desire, of the male participants, to avoid offending female participants with linguistic features typically associated with building and maintaining solidarity in an all-male scenario.

This is an issue, as these results imply that even though instances in which the objectification of women and the denigration of homosexuality occur, they decline when a female is present and they are, of course, still prevalent in all-male discourse.

The fact these features decline in mixed-sex interactions, perhaps as a means to avoid ‘offending’ female participants, is in itself an offensive notion and only serves to iterate the misconception that femininity and homosexual masculinities are somehow subordinate to heterosexual masculinity.

This research has also demonstrated that dominant male speakers are involved in more instances in which face-threats and insults occur, use intensifiers more frequently, but hedge the force of an assertion, latch on to other participants’ utterances and attempt to interrupt other participants’ utterances less frequently in mixed-sex interactions than they do in single-sex interactions, while subordinate male speakers in mixed-sex interactions do the exact opposite.

This suggests that these features may be directly linked with speaker dominance and if so, it could be speaker dominance that dictates these variances, or vice versa, between single- and mixed-sex interactions in the speech of male participants.

Further investigation into the validity of these assertions could provide a framework by which speaker dominance can be predicted, not just in terms of the distribution of time spent speaking but also in terms of the above mentioned linguistic features.

Additionally, this research suggests that the level of familiarity with female participants could be a contributing factor to the level of conversational dominance displayed by male participants in mixed-sex interactions. Future research could test this hypothesis by investigating variations in speaker dominance of male participants between single- and mixed-sex interactions where more female participants are involved, thus creating various mixed-sex scenarios for comparison.

The rate at which interruption attempts occurred decreased by 15.7%, the rate with which minimal responses occurred increased by 21.75% and the time spent producing narratives decreased from 45.5% to 15.6%. These results suggest a convergence, by male speakers, towards a collaborative style in mixed-sex interactions. However, the rate with which questions were asked decreased by 44.7% and instances of overlapping speech decreased by 29.8%, suggesting a divergence, by male speakers, away from a collaborative speech style in mixed-sex interactions.

The implication of this is that hegemonic masculine traits disappear within mixed-sex cohorts – or at the very least decline. This suggests that male speakers are able to converge with different styles depending on the context. When in single-sex cohorts the focus seems to be on the gaining and holding of power. With this in mind, it is little wonder that masculinity is thought so poorly of.

Children in Care

Children in care suffer educational disadvantage. This stark inequality is utterly unacceptable. Currently, a mere 14% of Looked After Children (LACs) achieve 5 A*-C grades in their GCSE examinations; only 1% go on to study at university.

Limiting factors during childhood contibute to behavioural and social problems: these children aren’t inherently ‘bad’ but develop negative traits due to the limit in their ability to learn, to conform, to progress, within a mainstream setting.

The fact that 60% of Looked After Children come from backgrounds of abuse and neglect means that these young people struggle to place trust in adults, and fail to conform to their expectations.

When we talk about privilege, we do not only refer to financial prosperity. Equality refers to much more than money: equal educational opportunities, love, care, acceptance. Children in care often have sparsely allocated resources: few books, little space to study, limited interaction with consistent, responsible adults. This is not a constructive space within which an individual can thrive. This is not a position of privilege.

It is little wonder that Looked After Children are so often ‘left behind’ in our educational system. With so many students to facilitate, a mainstream teacher struggles to meet the needs of ‘challenging’ individuals with so many priorities: Free School Meals students, Pupil Premium students, Special Educational Needs students, the gender gap, an organisations specific marking policy, administrative workloads no one can envy…

Does our system of education benefit those at the bottom – the students? Or does it benefit those at the top – the highly paid senoir leaders – whose constant desire for quantifiable data and proof create a catalogue of menial tasks for teachers to wade through?

Can teachers inspire and motivate when they are deflated? Are they any more than footsoldiers just “following orders”? When did autonomy become so constrained?