Following your reading, why do you think we titled the book, "Eyes Are Never quiet"?

I believe the book was titled "Eyes Are Never Quiet", because it's referring to what you see as

an educator/peer/parent when your students/friends/children, walk into a room. Individuals

express so much with their eyes because it is the one place where you can’t hide your

emotions. A student or friend might be able to verbally tell you that everything is okay at home,

but when you read into someone’s expression you sometimes find that what they are telling you

might not be very accurate.

What are two take-aways from learning about the Adverse Childhood Experiences that

you can explain and relate to your own life?

One thing that really stuck out to me from learning about the Adverse Childhood Experiences

was the relationship between a student’s attitude and how it progressed during the week. In

addition, how this attitude quickly changes as the weekend approaches due to inconsistent

experiences at home. Something that I had not really spent a lot of time thinking about was

where people go when they leave school on Friday afternoons. The part in the book about

students not returning to class on Monday after a weekend reminded me my mom’s IPS

teaching experiences. At the school that my mom worked at, many of the students had difficult

home lives and she shared about how teachers would want to go and pick students up from

their homes just so they could be in the positive atmosphere with people trying to connect with

them. The kids could be in class one day and be gone the next because they had to deal with

their adversities and many ACE’s in their home setting. Additionally, I think placing all the

adversities that one individual can experience in their daily life was important to me because it

ensures the teaching that you really don’t know what someone else is experiencing in their life.

Therefore, you should treat everyone in a way that promotes a positive interaction. When I was
in high school, I was a teaching assistant for a math class that had students who were behind

their grade level. Whenever I worked with the kids, I always tried to make connections with them

so that they could feel comfortable in that class and see that I was only there to help them

succeed. I feel as though most of those students in that classroom were there not because of

their inability to understand the material, but because they were so hyper focused on adversities

at home that they couldn’t focus on the material at hand. They focused a majority of their time

acting out, which the administration did not have an individualized approach for working with

these students, leading them right back to a survival mode brain state.

From what you have learned, how does discipline and behavior management in all

situations change, based on the developing brain and adversity and trauma?

When a developing brain has experienced adversity and trauma, the brain looks at any type of

punitive discipline or behavior management as another trauma. The brain goes into a survival

mode, as when it experiences adversities at home/socially, which completely shuts down the

learning function. Educators should do more to inhibit this shutdown by moving away from strict

discipline and behavior management, thus realizing that this is something that might need to be

customized for each student regardless of any trauma experienced. There shouldn’t be a single

method to working with students because each student has a different story and each student

has different needs to function in a non-survival state of mind.