The speaker at a lecture I attended yesterday took a concept I was very familiar with and presented it to me from the opposite direction.

Brilliant.

One of the people who have had a huge impact on my teaching (though I’ve never met him) is Richard Lavoie. When watching his films I have always felt that he has the gift of phrasing things in a manner which is both very simple to grasp and very powerful. I was introduced to his films back in college and have seen them countless times since (its so easy now, with YouTube! Used to be much harder to do.).

In the segement I have embedded below, Lavoie compares self esteem to poker chips. He talks about how the special needs child “loses” poker chips all day long through negative encounters. He emphasizes how everyone who cares about the child should invest in keeping the number of chips the child has high, so that the everyday losses will not have the power to crush the child. That has been a strong influence in my developing and searching for Eureka Moment strategies, which allow the struggling learners to achieve some success in my classroom. The crisis and outbursts are not avoided, but they are less intense and are forgotten more quickly.

The speaker at the lecture pointed out that we, the teachers, need to work on keeping those chips high too.

Yes, keeping a balance between work and the rest of our life is often  a topic discussed in publications, online and even has even been mentioned on this blog. That in itself wasn’t new for me.

What hit me was the realization that I, as a teacher and a person, can’t wait for the administrators to realize that “If You Don’t Feed the Teachers They Eat the Students!“ and start being more supportive of the teachers. I can’t expect the students to stop venting their frustration at me regarding  what they can’t achieve (the fact that they now know more than they did when they begun is scant comfort to the high-school students who can’t take the final national exams with their peers). And I certainly can’t seem to learn to hang clothes on the clothesline any faster than my turtle’s pace…

I lose chips all day too. But, unlike the children, I take responsibility for replenishing my own chips. So it seems like when I make big decisions such as investing in the trip to IATEFL conference in Liverpool or minor ones, such as ignoring everything else and sitting down to write on my blog (like now!),  I’m simply replenishing my chips.

You may say “duh”, but I really hadn’t thought of it that way. Did you?