Monday, March 18, 2019

Smile While You Dial

Last night, Angela Watson tweeted out an article about being a warm demander. I had wanted to read it at the time, but the cold medicine had other plans for me; I was unconscious on the couch before the page even loaded.  Equipped with my coffee, I gave it another shot this morning. I was congested, exhausted, and hoping my students would require as little of me as possible today when I came across this line:

A question sounds different when the person asking is smiling. Your willingness to be vulnerable as a student and participate increases when the person is smiling...I found that I also really liked the way it felt as a teacher — it changed my energy and perspective when I spent much of the day smiling at my students, and it became a learned behavior. 

Reading this line transported me back to my days working at Phonathon in college, cold-calling alumni to ask them for money. It wasn't the greatest job in the world, but I loved my coworkers, you could wear pajamas, and it paid well, better if you were good at it. Phonathon had many procedures, but one of them trumped all: smile while you dial.

The idea was that if you smiled, it would come across in your voice, even if you weren't feeling happy, even though the alumni couldn't see your face. Your smile would project warmth and trustworthiness and would (theoretically) take that nice alumna back to her glory days as a college coed with her whole life ahead of her. (We also noticed that, as female callers, it helped to talk to the men in a higher register, but that's a separate issue for another day.) At Phonathon, where appearance matters so little that you can sit in your holey sweatpants and shoot Nerf guns at each other while slowly barricading yourself behind a tower of coffee cups and candy wrappers (thank you, hands-free autodial), the look on your face was the single most important thing.

I started to think about my classroom. Am I smiling while I'm dialing? Am I already smiling when students walk into the room, or am I waiting for them to give me something? Are my smiles conditional, or are they handed out as freely as my cheap Amazon pencils? And how can I get away with using Nerf guns in class? As I taught my first block this morning, I made a conscious decision to smile as much as possible. As usual, Angela Watson was right. My students were in a better headspace, and despite being sick, tired, and way behind in my grading, so was I.


5 comments:

  1. Interesting. I hadn't hear about any of this before. I am going to read that article...and work on smiling more in class.

    ReplyDelete
  2. What a great connection you make here between the warm demander and the phrase taught to you when you were soliciting support over the phone.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Smiling is a good action to reflect on!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I sign up for Truth for Teachers and always find that I am struggling for time to read the whole article-thanks for pulling such a salient nugget (I did go back and read the whole article this time!). I love this line, "Are my smiles conditional, or are they handed out as freely as my cheap Amazon pencils?" Thanks for a great slice!

    ReplyDelete
  5. I love Angela Watson's work! Her common sense approach to everything has been invaluable to my teaching life. This is a great slice. Thanks for reminding me of this simple technique to bring more joy to my students and myself. I am going to use this tomorrow!

    ReplyDelete