serenity now!

i attended a teacher training once where the session facilitator encouraged us to teach our students anger management. she suggested we have our students imagine "black balls of hate" inside us, between our stomachs and our hearts, and squeezing that ball and expelling it with deep breaths.

the problem with this strategy is that it reminds me too much of the episode from Seinfeld where the characters are encouraged to say the phrase "serenity now" to deal with their anger and frustration, but all they end up doing is suppressing it until it explodes violently in eruptive, pressurized catharsis.


when i think about all the teachers who get fired for accidentally hitting kids, or for disorderly public conduct, or for writing extremely critical blogs, i think about all the ways in which these teachers probably weren't receiving the support they needed, and about all the bullshit they were probably told that didn't help them.