By the time Tuesday came around, I couldn’t wait to see the group. The students came right in and automatically arranged the tables for us. How great was that! I passed out the books along with the depression assessment sheets I use as a baseline. Several of the kids started talking about how negative the questions were on the assessment. I had never heard that before. Through the conversation it became clear that about half of the group were not depressed or anxious. I gave them the ACEs survey and found that only 3 of the 9 had a score greater than 2. A score of 2 or greater is an indicator of a trauma-affected childhood. Now What!
I needed time to re-think how to use Life Lessons for this group of emotionally diverse students. I showed the you tube video called Caine’s Arcade. It’s a delightful story of a young boy who built an Arcade out of boxes in his dad’s Auto Parts Store. It pulled the group together in a positive way.
On my way home, I noticed something different happening for me emotionally. I knew that using the booklet was awkward for me and I saw that Session Two wasn’t working, but I didn’t feel like I wanted to give up. In fact, the opposite happened. I wanted to figure out how to make my material work for this diverse group. I think I got it figured out. I’ll let you know how it works next week.
But what I didn’t do was The Booklet! What was I thinking?