Alright
this RPF is coming to you all a day early because I do not think I will be able
to access the internet tomorrow, consider it an early Christmas present since I
do not really trust the Honduran postal system or have the money to send things
to you all. I believe that last week’s RPF was a rousing success as I received lots
of really nice comments so thank you all for those, I was pretty proud of what
my mind was able to come up with last week. I am also pretty proud of what my
mind has come up with this week and I don’t want to say it is a world changer
because I have just thought of it 30 minutes ago but it just might have some
sort of positive impact on this world.
Alright
to preface this idea I need to first tell you what I have been doing this week,
on Monday I began giving a sort of tutoring/summer school to a group of ten
kids at the school. I meet with them for 2 hours for three days a week, this
being the first week of the class I did not teach any real subject material but
instead tried to teach them about the rules of the class, the procedures of the
class, and some different social skills. All of these ideas are completely new
to these students as they have never in their lives experienced a teacher such
as myself, this change of culture at times is tough but kids are so good at
adapting and changing that the change seems to be going rather smoothly. One of
the main differences in my teaching methodology and thee teaching methodology here
is that I like to use what is called Positive Behavior Reinforcement (PBR). Without
getting too deep into educational psychology, this is actually a rather basic
idea that says that basically all kids want attention and anyone who has ever
interacted with a child before can attest to this. Now kids will do just about
anything for attention, both good things and bad things. What PBR says is that
you should only pay attention or rather give the child attention for the good
things that they do (now granted if a kid is doing something really bad it
needs to be addressed, but the little things like talking out of turn etc. can
be ignored). By giving the child attention when they do good things you are
essentially conditioning (Pavlov’s Dog…) them and reinforcing them to want to
do more good things. Now I have used this technique in my classrooms before and
trust me, it works amazingly well if you are addressing a class and there is
only one kid who is paying attention all you have to do is thank that one child
and tell them how nice of a job they were just doing. That child feels great
because he was doing the right thing and will want to do it more in the future
meanwhile everyone else who was talking realize what they were doing was wrong
and they realize what they need to do in the future if they want attention.
Anyways,
fast forward to 30 minutes ago when I logged onto CNN to catch up on some
worldly events. After a few minutes of reading about how the Euro is going to
fail, two journalists were assassinated in Tegus, and the ongoing global
climate crisis I realized that there is a lot of bad going on in the world
right now. Also being so close to the Copan Ruins where the Maya predicted the
world was going to end in 2012, the thought that they were right may have
crossed my mind as well (but just for a second…). It was at that moment that I thought
“Hey, maybe all of this bad stuff in the news is simply reinforcing the people
of the world to do more bad stuff.” Now I am not saying that anyone out there
in the world is consciously thinking “I want attention, let me log onto CNN,
seems like you get attention from doing bad things in the world, I am going to
go do some bad things them…” at least I hope no one out there follows that same
thought pattern.
We
are a glass half empty society; we seem to dwell on the things that are going
bad and the problems of the world instead of focusing instead on the things
that are being done to solve these problems and the good things that are
happening everyday all over the world. I guarantee that there are more good
things that are happening in the world everyday than there are bad things so
why do we as a society choose to focus on the minority? I think there should be
more good stories in the news such as these two websites: www.happnews.com and www.goodnewsstories.org. If there was
more attention and celebrity given to those doing the right things in the world
instead of celebrity and attention going to… well celebrities like Lindsay
Lohan, Charlie Sheen, and latest celebrity X our world would be in a much
better place. To borrow a quote from Anne Frank in honor of finding out
yesterday that the librarian I work with did not know what the Holocaust was
until I told her (stunning I know, but that’s a whole different blog… also not
sure if it is everyone in Honduras or just her but my logic points towards
everyone), “Despite everything I think people are good at heart” well I believe
the same thing. If we start paying more attention to the good things in the
world, become a glass half full type of society then maybe just maybe we can
turn this world of ours into a happy one.
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