TED talks have done a lot this year to push me as administrator. They’ve been informative, and thought provoking, and fun. I can’t count the times that a student has ducked in my office and during the course of our conversation I’ve said something like:

“Oh, you’ve got to check this video out”

and off we go to watch a TED talk. So off we go to watch a TED talk.

Check out the Empathy section (from about minutes 5 to 8):

Favorite Quotes

The scariest thing is that his IQ is 160. A certified genius. But there is zero correlation between IQ and emotional empathy..

How could you have done it? Didn’t you feel any pity for your victims? These were very intimate murders, he strangled his victims. And the strangler stated very matter-of-factly “Oh no. If I’d felt their distress I could not have done it. I had to turn that part of me off.”.

What’s this have to do with working with young people?

(and yes I did just make a connection between being a serial killer and working with kids)

We’re all bright. In a school sort of way. There’s nobody hanging out here in education that isn’t wielding at least one degree of one level or another.

How bright are we emotionally?

Do we feel our student’s distress?

Genuinely

If we do feel their distress how can we continue to make the decisions about young people that we are making? Teaching young people is very intimate. I ask again: how can we make the decisions that we are making and take the actions that we are taking if we haven’t turned that part of ourselves off?

There’s a laminated poster on a wall somewhere in my school that says:

Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child’s spirit; for such mutilation undercuts the life principle of trust, without which every human act, may it feel ever so good and seem ever so right, is prone to perversion by destructive forms of conscientiousness.Erik Erikson

That should be our mission statement.

I’ve Kozol across my office staring me down saying:

Go buy the Americans Who Tell the Truth Book

If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there’s no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream. The kids have eyes and they can see, and they have ears and they can hear. Kids notice that no politicians talk about this. Nobody says we’re going to make them less separate and more equal. Nobody says that.Jonathan Kozol

The Bottom Line

It doesn’t matter how smart you are, or how many letters you have after your name, or what your technorati rank is. What matters, in this business and in life, is your emotional intelligence and never ever turning that part of yourself off.

Not even for a second.

Technorati Tags: TED talks, another one of the millions of reasons that IQ tests are meaningless, administration