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Anxiety, Resilience and Learning
By Bill Steele
Some might say I had a school phobia. Others might say I had an attachment disorder and still others might say that given the situation, I showed a lot of strength for a six-year-old kid.
I hate to admit this, but back in my day, there was no school bus; either you walked, rode a bike or were driven to school. My school was a little over a mile away. I was too young to ride a bike that far, my father was at work (he worked two jobs), and my mother did not drive so she walked me to school on my first day.
I remember nothing about kindergarten, however, I do remember my first day in the first grade. The school phobia I just mentioned relates to this day of school and provides, without going into detail, a bit about my home life and relationships that shaped my approach to trauma and learning.
I just remember being terrified. How terrified? Well, my mother got me to school and thought she left me in good hands. This was a Catholic school, the one I attended for eight years–a story in itself. After my mother left, I actually managed to sneak out and followed her all the way home. After she went into the house, I sat on the porch until, to her amazement, she found me. Attachment, anxiety issues to be sure but the determination and savvy of that six-year-old to sneak his way out of school, then safely cross all those streets and never let his mother see him speaks volumes to the resources he could muster and use many times over in the years that followed.
Now the one positive move my mother made was to grab my hand and walk me right back to school. Only this time she took me, along with the principal, right to my teacher, Sister Joanna Mary. Sister Mary immediately put me in charge of cleaning all the erasers. Although I was a poor learner, which I will speak about shortly, I never missed another day of school. Sister Mary spoke to my strengths, not my fears. She engaged me in doing something and made me feel important. That was my “trauma therapy,” if you will. At home, I was never quite good enough in my parents' eyes and continued to be a disappointment in the years that followed. If you are told enough that you don’t measure up, you learn to get really good at not measuring up. In fact, I did not talk at home until late into the second grade. Why talk, it didn’t seem to matter.
So what makes sense to me is that it only takes one person one moment in time to make a significant difference in our lives. It was the first time I really experienced someone like Sister Mary – kind and excited to have me in her class. She had a far more positive influence on me at the time than did my mother, who deteriorated emotionally in the years that followed. However, what also makes sense is that despite how poorly a parent may behave there remains the potential for that parent to do the right thing at the right time and create a defining moment of change. School, at least the first year with Sister Mary, in particular, became a defining moment that carried me through the next several difficult years. By the way, that was the last day my mother walked with me or ever came to see me at school. My older sister was given the responsibility of getting me to and from school, which was okay with me.
The following years were not so good. After the first year, Sister Mary was no longer my teacher and things went downhill from there. There were no more Sisters like Sister Mary. The connection with my mother was filled with conflict. By the fifth grade, I was coming home with D’s, could not solve basic math problems and home life was getting worse. I wasn’t learning except for a geography class taught by Miss Dowd. She had us doing lots of projects. Somehow I got through the eighth grade, but I flunked the IQ entrance exam twice for the local Catholic high school. I was told college prep was out of the question. I would need a lot of tutoring just to get through basic general education freshman courses. So what makes sense to me is that if a child is plagued by anxiety and does not have a continual positive connection to an adult in the early years of his life, learning will become a challenge and behaviors will become survivor behaviors and likely be misdiagnosed.
Good teachers know, and it makes sense to me, that we can not continue to attempt to improve children’s learning capacity by focusing on subject matter and gauging how well they are doing by testing their retention. That is not what will prevent such kids from dropping out, which I’m sure I would have done. Actually, by the fifth grade, I had all the predictors associated with dropout kids. Continuing to test for content without addressing children's emotional needs will simply lead to more and more students dropping out of school.
Capturing the full capacity of our ability to learn and perform well has less to do with what we are taught, or in many ways even the way we are taught, and more to do with how we experience ourselves, the actual learning environment and the teachers, staff, and other students in that environment. What changed my course in life at the end of the eighth grade was, once more, an experience with another adult connection.
Here is the rest of the story…The Catholic high school had a priest, Father Oulette, who was responsible for recruiting kids from local grade schools to enter their seminary. He had approached me in the eighth grade to talk about the possibility of getting me to join. He obviously saw something in me no one else had seen, including myself. Even though I flunked their entrance exam he thought I was a good candidate. The seminary was located in Massachusetts, so I would be far away from home, which was very appealing. Also the pictures he showed me were of a place in the woods, with a farm and a lake. It sounded and looked great. The summer before high school he took me and several other kids for a visit. After that I was ready to go and, of course, my mother thought my life had been redeemed. That September, thanks to Father Oulette, another adult connection, I was about to experience a very significant life change.
Being away from home over the next six years was both the best and worst thing that happened. I’ll talk about the worst part perhaps some other time. The best part was I no longer lived at home, was in a great physical environment away from the city, in a whole new world where there was so much to discover. Remember, I enjoyed geography and the vast wooded land, the lake and the farm at the seminary made me feel wonderfully safe. There were only 100 of us in all, freshman through seniors, so we had lots of attention. Saturdays were a full day of work and Wednesdays a half-day of work. I learned how to drive a tractor, clear the woods for a road we built to the lake, feed and care for the cows, pigs and chickens, taught to use my hands for all kinds of repairs, plumbing, electrical, replacing glass windows, even digging a lengthy ditch to drain the water off the field we used for baseball and football. We were all taught to take pride in our environment and be responsible for keeping it clean. Some kids definitely do much better away from home despite research to the contrary.
So what about school itself? Well, the first thing we were all taught was how to learn. I received special attention and was ready for it. I did not want to leave this place. And guess what, every course was a college prep course! I took English, Latin, French and algebra and other subjects in the first year and I actually learned. We studied every day, seven days a week; in the morning before Mass, every afternoon before dinner and every evening before bedtime. And we had plenty to study.
Obviously, I not only learned how to learn, but came to enjoy learning, although algebra and I never really got to be best friends. Geometry was a bit easier because our teacher (all priests) had us apply it to building the ball field, roads in the woods and other hands-on projects we could take ownership of and pride in accomplishing.
So it makes no sense to me that in many states, including Michigan, school counselors, social workers, and psychologists are being cut from the budget, especially at the elementary levels. It makes no sense that the school counselors and social workers that still have jobs have less time to build relationships with challenging students and are directed to assist with testing. It makes no sense that some schools are cutting recess time in order to spend more time on testing proficiency.
It makes no sense to me that teachers are not given the time to teach students how to learn. In my sophomore year, this likely drop out actually won the school spelling bee by literally memorizing five hundred words using the learning techniques taught me as a freshman which could have been learned in elementary school.
It makes no sense to me that students are allowed to litter the halls with paper and candy wrappers and are not held accountable for keeping their environment clean. It makes no sense to me that we build schools to house a thousand plus students when developmentally and emotionally even teens need lots of attending and personal connections, but most importantly an environment that is flexible enough to meet the needs of high-risk students. Large environments will continue to produce high drop out rates.
What Does Makes Sense to Me
The full utilization of one’s capacity to learn is predicated upon being in an environment where one feels above all safe and valued. A part of feeling safe in our environment is being held accountable for respecting its physical aspects and being responsible for its upkeep, being connected to an adult(s) who believes in our ability to learn and who has the time it takes every day to mentor and guide, being given multiple opportunities to engage in different activities other than academic until we find what allows us to experience ourselves as competent, and being in an environment that believes in the potential of every child to learn. Once these are in place anxiety diminishes and learning flourishes.
A Bit More– Resilience
After completing this story, I sent it to my colleague for a final edit. She reminded me that my experiences contained all the elements of the CCDO model (Connections, Continuity, Dignity, Opportunities) we used in our research on resilience in traumatized children. The primary question we asked in this qualitative research was, “What allowed some of the traumatized youth we took through out evidence-based I Feel Better Now Program to do better than others?” In our evidence-based quantitative study all saw remarkable, statistically significant reduction of PTSD reactions and related mental health symptoms, but some saw greater gains than others.
After doing exhaustive reading on resilience and posttraumatic growth, we agreed that the article focused on the characteristics of resilient youth but failed to identify the types of experiences that created those characteristics we discovered to be associated with those who did better than the others. The CCDO model speaks to these experiences.
My story does address each of the components of the CCDO model. Although my connections were limited in early years (Sr. Mary, Ms. Dowd and Father Oulette) they were critical to my life course. Continuity was really absent from the perspective of having consistent connections and positive developmental experiences in the early years but certainly existed consistently at the high school level. I learned that it's never too late to help challenging kids turn the corner. Dignity speaks to being able to see oneself being of value, being good at something and basically being a good person. This was supported by the primary adult connections that had been made and the opportunities I was given in the seminary to work with my hands. Learning how to learn also provided me with a sense of dignity. Experiencing myself as a good person took years longer but the other elements related to dignity carried me through. Finally, the opportunity to feel a sense of belonging came in the seminary where we were also taught and engaged in learning the importance of generosity – caring for others. Frankly, I had to learn about how to care about others, how my behavior and actions could positively or negatively impact others. Regulating my behavior was not always easy but learning to care about others helped me at least take responsibility for my behavior.
Isn’t it interesting how we can sometimes discover strategies that reflect our experiences? These were not the only strategies that critically shaped my life but I do have to say they kept me alive, they gave me some hope, they allowed me to believe that life could be different and most importantly that there were adults out there who could really make a difference. It was these kinds of experiences that helped me become resilient and my capacity and desire to learn flourished as a result.
What Makes Sense To You?
Do feel free to comment and/or contact TLC if you have any questions at [email protected]
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