Outside The Box
Communicating with Our Children
Competent, Caring, Committed and Conscientious Teachers Needed
We cannot teach our children, if we do not love them. We cannot love them if we are afraid of them. We become afraid of our children if we cannot reach them. We cannot reach them if we cannot communicate with them. If we open the lines of communication with our students, then we will open all the doors that teachers need to pour knowledge, self-confidence, and moral awareness into their souls.
The word mentoring means many things to many people, but I define mentoring as a “relationship building” between an experienced person (a mentor or teacher) and a less-experienced person (a mentee
or student) to help develop the skills, behaviors and insights necessary to reach the partnership’s goals. First and foremost, teachers are mentors to the children under their guidance. Teachers must realize that the key word in this definition is “relationship” because it implies an interaction between two people.
In real estate, success is often determined by three words: location, location, location. Similarly, success in any relationship can be determined by three words: communication, communication, communication. When the lines of communication are broken in a relationship, abnormality usually follows. This is true for most relationships: husband and wife, parent and child, teacher and student, supervisor and subordinate, or mentor and mentee. If not broken, the lines of communication from teachers to students is filled with static, and as a result many of our students could be considered abnormal. If you listen to the language and observe the behavior of our students, then you might agree with a critical diagnosis. More than one million children drop out of school each year and that must be treated as an abnormal condition.
Across the United States, our children are engaged in self-destructive behavior and self-loathing language that teachers do not understand. If they are going to change, grow, and develop – and if we are going to help them get there – we must be able to communicate with them on their level. How can we help our children if we cannot talk with them? To teach and mentor our children, we must learn how to communicate with them, and not talk at them.
In war, a critical step to victory is the destruction of the enemy’s ability to communicate. In our society, the lines of communication between adults and children have been cut by class, race, age, sex, culture and/or neglect. If we do not communicate with our children, others will. Those ‘others’ might include gangsters, drug dealers, thugs and pimps. Some of the most influential ‘others’ of the 21st century have come from the industries of music and entertainment.
The music and entertainment industries excel at communication, especially engaging the language, behavior, and dreams of our children. Hip-Hop artists and athletes, in particular, have an enviable place in the hearts of our children because caring, responsible, and authentic adults have not been there. To communicate more effectively with our children, we need to better understand the core components of communication and a few basic principles of science. A simple communication model, shown in the figure below, has four components: a sender, a message, a channel, and a receiver. The message and channel may change, but the sender and the receiver are “fixed” components.
If a receiver (student) does not get a coherent message from a known sender (teacher), environmental factors, generally classified as noise and interference, can be the cause. Ideally, a communications system performs optimally with devices that can both send and receive. In teaching, our goal is to help convert receivers into senders, or students into teachers. For example, a parent wants their child to think like them and repeat what they have taught them without question – similar to call and response in the Black Church. Our aim as teachers, mentors, parents and caretakers must be the development of students (receivers) into functional, self-sufficient human beings, professionals and entrepreneurs (senders).
Hip-Hop is an excellent, influential, and powerful example of an ideally optimized communications system because it is difficult to delineate the sender from the receiver – they are virtually indistinguishable. In Hip-Hop, senders and receivers dress, act, speak, and think alike. If we were to visit the majority of secondary or postsecondary institutions in the United States, we could witness the imagery and behavior shown in a BET music video. To reach, teach, train and mentor our children, and mitigate the imposing presence of the music and entertainment industry, we must impact each of the four components of the communication model:
SENDER: The sender must be authentic and real. Our children can sense when we are not sincere. For example, many politicians, celebrities and leaders claim to speak for the children. They show up to present some computers, scholarships or supplies and gather the children for a photo opportunity and then leave only to be seen again next year. This is a classic example of ‘what teaching and mentoring are not.’ Our children experience this absenteeism and know that they have been misused. We can gather all the celebrities we want, and our children will gawk, but they will not listen to them because they realize it is only a show. Only through meaningful relationships with authentic teachers and people who care will our children be changed, motivated and inspired. People who are authentic have no problems communicating with our children wherever they are. Authenticity is not in your clothes, car, money, or your speech, but in the spirit of the words and actions that emanate from a heart generated by love for the children.
MESSAGE: The message we send to children with our teaching must be consistent, coherent, specific, and valid and supported by our actions. We can no longer tell our children to ‘Do what we say, not what we do.’ The message must be wrapped in a package and presented such that the children can digest it. Complex philosophies might be impressive, but they make no sense to our children. What messages have we sent that our children can hold on to, or find hope and direction? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said, “I have a dream” and inspired a generation of the past. This generation needs a “new” message!
CHANNEL: We must use diverse and varied avenues to communicate with our children. During our developmental years, most of us grew up with AM-FM radio, eight-channel televisions and cassette tapes as the primary channels for receiving information. Our children live in the Information Age. They communicate via a variety of channels including iPods, digital messaging, cell phones, pagers, 600-channel cable and satellite television, the Internet, My Space, You Tube, and Second Life to name a popular few. In the 21st century, teachers and parents cannot be analog while their children are digital. We must ensure that we communicate on the same channels as our children. We must interject the significant messages on these channels to mitigate the negative and disturbing messages that are pervasive right now. We cannot deny the existence of the channels, we must use them, because they will continue to develop and grow.
RECEIVER: The receivers, our children, must be accessible, targeted, and understood. We must understand our children and communicate with them to ensure that they learn what we want them to know. To target them, we must know where they are and go where they are.
Many teachers do not motivate our children because they cannot properly communicate with them. The student tunes out the teacher because the teacher has not taken the time to develop a lecture, program or plan to effectively reach the student. Many of our students are coming from a different world and place that we, the teachers, can relate to or have experienced. Understanding, teaching and mentoring our children start with “taking time with them.” Everyone wants to share their talents and treasures, but our children really need our time. Our children do not need trust funds, they need funds of trust. When a student determines that we are authentic, accepts that we care and perceives that you are competent, committed, and conscientious, we can teach and communicate anything to them. The more time we spend with them, the better we will understand them and will be in a better position to communicate with them, influence their behavior and educate them to compete in the 21st century.
Speaker, professor, author, and inventor: Calvin Mackie is a former associate
professor of mechanical engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans,
specializing in heat transfer and fluid dynamics. President Bush honored
him with the 2003 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco appointed Mackie to the 33-member Louisiana Recovery Authority, which is leading
the state’s rebuilding efforts following hurricanes Katrina and Rita. He is the author of A View from the Roof: Lessons for Life and Business. He was featured in Spike Lee’s HBO documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Parts and on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer as a panelist discussing the one-year anniversary of Katrina. |
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