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A teacher affects eternity; no one can tell where his influence stops. –Henry Adams

“It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it!” –my wife (more times than I can count)

Guys, let me tell you, I’ve been married for fourteen years now, and the moment you hear that, it’s pretty much over. Sure, you can debate semantics and linguistics all you want, and logically, on paper, I’m sure you’re on the money. Still, I hate to break it to you—you’ve got no shot. It doesn’t matter how airtight your logic. Your best option is to run up the white flag and surrender. Apologize as sincerely as possible and try to change the subject. Drop it and move on. This is fourteen years of marriage speaking. Trust me.

There is no way to win this fight, because what you said doesn’t mean a thing. The only thing that matters is what she heard. And what she understood about your meaning has a lot more to do with your tone of voice, facial expression, posture, and proximity than the words that came out of your mouth. Forget that you were in the process of pulling a bee’s stinger from your eyeball. It doesn’t matter.

I’ve noticed this to be true in the classroom as well. Regardless of how I feel on any given day, if I make a conscious effort to bring energy to my craft, the kids always seem more upbeat too.

It doesn’t matter what I say. If I say it with a smile, if my tone is upbeat, if I’m standing straight with my head up high, if I’m moving around the classroom, making eye contact—the kids are more engaged.

And thus, more learning takes place.

The opposite is also true. If I’m blah, to a certain extent, so is the rest of the classroom environment.

But this is all common sense stuff, right? Much like the stand-up comic, as teachers, we all know that our “delivery” matters . . .right? This isn’t rocket science.

Turns out, however—it is brain science.

How Feelings Are Contagious

According to research done at Harvard and the University of California at San Diego by Dr. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, who have been mining data collected from nearly 5,000 people over a period of twenty years, “Happiness spreads through social networks like an emotional contagion.” So if you bring positive energy to your lessons, that energy is going to rub off on your students.

But why is this? Here is where it gets truly fascinating. They’re called, mirror neurons, and their job in the brain is to literally mirror observed emotions so that a person actually feels the pain and joy of others.

This truly astounding neural WiFi was discovered by neuroscientists in monkeys in 1992; but they have since also confirmed the presence of mirror neurons in the human brain through a series of experiments so sensitive it boggles the mind. It turns out we now have electrodes so laser-thin that they can be implanted within a single brain cell. Not only are they small, but these electrodes are so sensitive that they can measure the firing of a single neuron.

In his book, Social Intelligence: The Revolutionary New Science of Human Relationships, Dan Goldman reports of a remarkable study. After implanting and monitoring an electrode in a fully conscious person, scientists found that the same specific neuron will fire when a person anticipates pain (of a pinprick) as well as when watching someone else receive a pinprick. As Goldman puts it, the lighting up of that electrode is the equivalent of taking a “neural snapshot of primal empathy in action.”

But that isn’t even the most powerful discovery. To understand that, we have to revisit what Christakis and Fowler discovered about happiness. As it turns out, the energy you bring to the classroom doesn’t merely stay there for the benefit of only that class with only that lesson. It ripples outward and affects people you don’t know, have never met, and in places you may have never been.

According to Christakis and Fowler, if you project positive energy, you increase the chance of feeling good in those near you by 25%, but it doesn’t stop there. When your students leave the classroom, people close to them (friends, family, neighbors, etc . . .) enjoy a 10% chance of experiencing positive energy. Likewise, a person close to that person has a 5.6% chance of getting a positive charge.

Ever wonder what happiness looks like? Each node in the diagram represents one person (circles are female, squares are male). The lines indicate relationships (black = siblings; red = friends, spouces). Color represents degree of happiness, with blue indicating “the blues,” and yellow indicating sheer joy. Green is somewhere in between. Images by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, courtesy of BMJ

The Impact of One Teacher

What does this mean? Let’s just say, for the sake of simplicity, that you come in contact with 50 students a day, and each of those students then interacts with just five other people. That’s 250 additional people that you can affect–bringing your total to 300. But it doesn’t stop there. Remember, you still have a 5.6% chance to affect all those who connect with those additional 250. If we keep it simple and give those 250 each five contacts, that increases your potential outreach by 1,250–bringing your grand total to 1,550 people each day.

And that’s just based on the students in your classes! (Yes, yes I know you teach more than that, but, “Dammit Jim! I’m a Language teacher not a mathwiz!”) Now calculate, if you like (and you are a math wiz), the rest of your contacts in a day, and you’ll truly begin to understand the scope of your influence.

You should feel good about that. Still, guys, it would NOT be wise to bring that up during your next communication snafu with your wives or girlfriends. It won’t help. Trust me on this one. Sometimes it is what you say.

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We’re in the middle of a unit on persuasion right now. I love this unit because it’s so rich–it’s a great topic from which to teach so many cool things. Yes, students learn persuasive techniques so that they can better manipulate their parents and teachers, but we also hunt for these techniques when we read sales letters and advertisements (reading standards); we search for them on the radio and TV commercials (listening standards). Writing with these techniques requires discipline, a keen understanding of audience, and attention to details (writing standards). From a Language Arts perspective, it’s good stuff–great stuff.

But it’s also a blast because we get tap into a little psychology, human behavior, and begin to think a bit about thinking.

One of the mind benders I introduce is famously known (in psychological circles anyway) as the “The Copy Machine” study, conducted by Ellen Langer, the first woman to earn tenure as a professor of psychology at Harvard.

The following is an excerpt from an article originally published in the New York Times by Philip Hilts.

In that study, she stationed someone at a copy machine in a busy graduate school office. When someone stepped up and began copying, Dr. Langer’s plant would come up to the person and interrupt, asking to butt in and make copies. The interruption was allowed fairly often, about 60 percent of the time. But the permission was granted almost 95 percent of the time if the person stepping up to interrupt not only asked, ”May I use the copy machine?” but added a reason, ”because I’m in a rush.”

That seems to make sense. People heard the reason and decided they were willing to step aside for a moment. What was odd, Dr. Langer found, was that if the interrupter asked, ”Can I use the machine?” and added a meaningless phrase, ”because I have to make copies,” the people at the machine also stepped aside nearly 95 percent of the time.

The idea, she said, is that the listener at the copy machine heard a two-part statement: a request and something like a reason. That was all their mental script for such a situation required. They never did reflect on the fact that the interrupter’s ”reason” was not meaningful.

As a teacher, I get dozens of requests an hour. Most are fairly pedestrian:

• “Can I borrow a pencil?”
• “Can I go to my locker?”
• “Can I get a drink?”
• “Can I go to the bathroom?”

Now, after we learn a few persuasive techniques, I tell the students to persuade me. After learning about the power of the word “because,” most of them use that . . .because it’s relatively simple.

And it works even better than “please”. Still, most of them forget.

“Mr. Wondra, I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Persuade me,” I’ll say.

They’ll roll their eyes, sigh heavily, do a little potty dance.

“But Mr. Wondra! I REALLY have to go . . .BAD!”

I nod and smile. Eventually, they realize I’m not budging and so fumble around until they construct coherent request. After awhile they begin to do it automatically–or at least they remember after I look at them and say nothing.

I figure this is good teaching–reinforcing the content using a real world application–right? Plus I get to play the powerful-hoity-toity teacher role.

This was the case the other day. I was in the back of the room spot checking (quickly assessing) an assignment, when a fairly quite but confident a girl walked over.

“Mr. Wondra, can I go the bathroom?”

I looked up. There was a slight pause, but her expression never changed, and she never broke eye contact.

“. . .because I have my period.”

Talk about a persuasive argument. She knocked that one out of the park.

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