What most clearly distinguishes man from animal is his inherent ability to handle verbal and symbolic languages. Currently, we find ourselves in a world in which image, flash, immediacy, haste prevail; a world in which the word has been relegated to a secondary and accessory plane.
Today's communication has largely lost that great capacity for symbolization, it has reduced the possibilities, the varieties of dialogue. The word is devalued, nobody believes in it, it has been replaced by action, often aggressive and disconcerting.
We know that the human being has a strong somatic and action component: fighting, sex, physical work, sport, are activities that have to do with movement. Situations of anguish, which one does not know how to handle, often give rise -especially in adolescence- to a behavior where that anguish is expelled through bodily communication, expressing itself essentially in the form of action and violence when emotionally uneducated.
To introduce an illustrative example, we can imagine the soldier, trained for action. He is not required to think, the initiative is very limited and restricted in a barracks or - much less - on the battlefield, he is only asked to act. On the other hand, the school environment is the antithesis to the barracks: it is the place of the symbolic, of the word, the space of expression of that other human aspect consisting of the ability to exchange symbols and work with abstractions. The school is based on the transmission and learning of symbols and words.
It is a place where the proposal consists of open the mind and relax the body, gradually incorporating the symbolic world, discernment, thought. In this small world organized for symbology, there appear, however, situations that are inscribed within a violent worldview derived from a population highly charged with hostility and isolation., manifesting itself in the form of bullying, physical violence, aggressiveness; a world in which dialogue loses value in favor of another type of interaction, obviously less desirable.
In this context, the teacher faces difficult situations and crossroads. Today's teacher is immersed in a bewildering universe that he does not know how to handle because he is trained for symbols, words and is far from being prepared to respond appropriately to action. If at school, the temple of symbolism and thought, the aggressive reaction appears, it is experienced as something unexpected, difficult to interpret and complicated to administer.. The reaction in a school is like the fox in the henhouse, it can be managed, but the damage produced is inevitable.
Today's school is not as punitive as before, it is barely admonished if the student answers with out-of-temper boxes or throws a chalk on the blackboard. The gravest transgressions that could once be imagined would go unpunished today. Today's teachers face acts such as a student kicking a teacher, fights with knives; he faces some passive students who can ignore the teacher's instructions, who, while the teacher explains, they talk placidly or are looking at the mobile.
The educator is prepared for the utopian scenario in which the school is an ideal space for pedagogical development and where students attend eager to learn. This type of training, despite all the above, has not been modified, the teacher has not been prepared for the emotional management of a conflictive group, He is not trained for this type of, increasingly daily, violent scenes, nor is he provided with the appropriate tools to combat them and, thus, it happens that you have to be little less than a hero of legend to exercise the vocation of teacher in the moments that run.
If the school community does not modify its modus operandi, it will not be able to contain a population of children who arrive with high levels of violence and permissiveness because society has become both lax and aggressive. Among the worst things that have led the country to the crisis, which still prevails and prevails, is the true fact that certain ideals and principles that seemed eternal and universal have been thrown away.
In groups of Coaching Club We work with teachers in different ways, through the fusion of various highly contrasted methodologies, we provide educators with different emotional management toolsl who will accompany you first; in amplifying their own capacity to go through the new circumstances that are experienced today in the school and later in the management of the groups within the classrooms.
A teacher can react in many ways to a violent act: be paralyzed, also respond violently, control and repress yourself because you know the penalties that act in another way entails. But the evil, in any case, is done because the feeling of powerlessness, sadness, total helplessness, undervaluation, frustration invades him..
Nor is he exempt from the danger of a certain paranoia because he fears an aggression, inside or outside the class, conditioning all his work and all his impartiality when evaluating those more aggressive students.
What is certain that the teacher will happen is that he will go through a situation of chronic contraction that we all know as stress, manifesting itself in different somatic symptoms, for example, affecting a specific organ, usually the throat, which is obviously one of its main work tools.
Being aware of all these issues and dangers does not mean that the trainer will change his attitude immediately or that he will simply avoid them, but it allows him to explore and acquire better emotional management tools. In addition, the fact that the teacher is not aware of what is really happening causes the effect to increase their psychological malignancy.
In short, it is essential that educators work decisively on the emotional aspect of their daily work so that their profession does not become an activity of high physical and, above all, psychological risk. It goes without saying that it is also necessary work with families about the model of education and emotional culture which would be desirable, although this topic is so broad that we can only postpone it for a new article.
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