Lesson 2: Stress

I do feel bad that this lesson was divided by the weekend. I left my poor kids all stressed out, with no way to deal with it until next week. But I did assign a cool homework.

We started off with a Stress Assessment and I was able to review each line item, including revealing that my family member, my father, had died when I was young, meaning that I started off my assessment with a 100, having experienced the most stressful situation you can experience. I’m going to try this whole ‘personally revealing’ thing and talked about a friend who went to jail, how hard it was to work in my family’s restaurant, the stress of the awkward sex conversation (“So, how many partners have you had?”), how it is their job as teenagers to push their parents/give them trouble and find that limit… and it is their parents’ jobs to define their limit. And that that limit is based on whatever their parent thinks in the limit: religious, cultural, hopefully legal, etc. I used the example that my mother said I couldn’t do something specifically because Chinese Daughters don’t do it. For no other reason. I also shared that as an adult, and now a mother myself, I will not draw those same lines with my own daughter, for my own reasons.

I played the Mortal Combat elevator prank youtube video to show how we respond to stress. It was quite funny and made my kids laugh. I also got the idea from Bruce Freaking Lipton at one of his talks. Other than the politics of this place and the fact that I sometimes fear getting fired because I know things others don’t (holistic stuff, etc), I do love my teaching life.

That said, I am still in the new/uncomfortable stage of this job: I don’t always know where I’m supposed to be and what I’m supposed to be doing there and if there’s someone else who knows the answer better than I do.