Emotion

Don’t Let Anyone into Your Mind

• Emotion controls our concentration. When we are happy, we can concentrate. When we are unhappy, our mind drifts to many things. Emotion is a very important factor of learning, and so influences the level of grades the student can get.
• When one student threatens another, or offends their identity by calling them names, the mind of the victim will be more on the offender than on what they should be learning. As parts of their learning become uncertain because of this, the student’s performance deteriorates and their grades fall.

If you hear the word emotion, without being aware of what I have just explained, you would probably think of being upset or of being over excited, and so of the ways you could behave. However, emotion, as I have just indicated, is a very important factor of performance in school. In fact, by how sensitive we are in our emotions, we set the base for how we develop to understand the world about us and what others mean.

If we feel safe, happy and secure, we can direct our attention to things that interest us or to information we are required to learn. However, if we feel concerned or worried about something or someone, our mind will focus more on this than on what we are trying to understand.

So, when a student is looking at the board the teacher is writing on, they may appear to be listening to them, or they may seem to be engrossed in some math problem or physics equation, but if their mind is trying to find security from others they will only be partially focusing on the task we see them doing.

There are many reasons that can cause the student to be distracted, but the main causes that really disrupt their thinking processes come from some trouble at home (such as parents fighting or parents divorced) or the stress they have from others in school. This stress can come from one particular bully who wishes to physically hurt them, or from a group of children who single them out for ridicule and so attack their identity.

While bullying has always been a feature of school life, it occurs more frequently today than it ever did in the past. This is largely due to cyber bullying (text messaging), because it more easily affects the mind of the victim. In the old days, the victim could avoid the bully as much as they physically could, but with text messaging the bully can invade their mind when they are home and even in bed, and so create a 24/7 disturbance to their mind.

What is very important to realize here, is that such mental pressure does not just make the victim frightened, which has led an increasing number to take their own life, but that this fear actually disturbs the chemistry in their brain.