You should have this as a tattoo
My first boss said something I've adopted as a motto. We were talking about students who 'don't want to learn' - "Why do they bother showing up?" I said.
Pointing out the window, he said:
"Always remember you're competing for attention with that."Injunctions=brainwashing
It's not just 'that' we're competing with. There's other teachers for a start.
Transactional Analysis, a psychotherapy schism, has a term which wraps this idea up neatly. We all have:
'...messages from our parents that we have been programmed to accept and that we unknowingly incorporate into our lives...'It's you against the world, kid
What this means for teachers is that every time you tell somebody something, you're competing with their parents. And every other major influence on their life. With children, this might not be so bad as you may well be the most influential person. However, if you're teaching adults and this is true, you are probably a cult leader.
If only we could blame the parents...
In my early twenties I had the 'sticky legs' recurring dream. In it, every time I tried to run it felt like my legs were in treacle. (You don't have to be a psychologist to interpret that dream...) Walking down the road to a tram stop, my friend, seeing an approaching tram, said, "Shall we run?" I started to say, "I can't, my legs get stuck like they're in mud." My friend was Czech and used to me getting things hopelessly wrong. She just repeated the question. We ran and caught the tram. (Incidentally, I never had the dream again. This injunction didn't stand up to daylight scrutiny.) This is an injunction borne of a recurring dream.
You might be competing with dreams.
Competing with ghosts
I'm a parent with young children. I find myself giving my children insane advice. And snap at them for absurd infractions probably inherited from grandparents and great-grandparents and other people I've never met who lived through the war, senility and alcoholism. And all in a pre-Ben Goldacre world.
You are competing with dead people.
They just won't die!
Although I scoff at people who insist on wearing scarves to ward off colds, I caught myself saying the other day, "Don't put that coin in your mouth, it's been in a bus driver's pocket." No, I don't know what that means either.
You are competing.
[Brief, possibly unnecessary, disclaimer: I have little patience with psychotherapy. Which is possibly a failing on my part. And I've noticed that conversations between adults that end up 'blaming mother' rarely go well. But I haven't been able to find this concept expressed better elsewhere - if you have, please leave links in the comments. Part of being good at helping people learn is stealing from wherever you can. The mind's a Kluge and lessons should be too.]
The description of an injunction comes from Zeus and Skiffington's The Coaching at Work Toolkit
Next time: Idea-Killing Zombies in the Training Room!
2 comments:
See, I'm totally not a fan of Psychoanalysis, except that I have a certain soft spot for Transactional Analysis. My reasons for this can be loosely classified into: (a) it's a much easier handle to grasp than id, ego and superego; (b) I have sometimes found it a useful paradigm with which to frame my and other people's behaviour. Both, I guess, comes down to terminology helping one's understanding.
Thinking about it more carefully, I've decided that it's not so much psychoanalysis that I'm wary of. Or even psychotherapy. And, like you, I've got time for Transactional Analysis and have seen people make huge progress using CBT, Motivational Interviewing and other Trademark techniques.
But pyschotherapists (especially the kind who put up business cards in shop windows) just put the willies up me.
NB If you're reading this and you are a psychotherapist, please take this comment as a sign that I'm in denial and out of touch with my anti-cynical sde.
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