Educational Equity Emancipation
“We have to do better”… That’s Dr. Almitra Berry’s heart-felt answer when asked about educating children from diverse cultural and language backgrounds.
Dr. Berry has a strong message for educators and school system leaders who don’t understand that cultural differences can profoundly affect the quality of education these children experience…
“You have children with failing test scores. You have teachers who want to teach but aren’t given the freedom or allowed to use the tools and strategies they need. You have teachers leaving the profession in droves.
And you have tax-paying parents who are very dissatisfied with their children’s education but don’t know how to effect change.”
In other words, our education system has a crisis on its hands. And this crisis affects all of us, not just teachers and those in the educational establishment.
It’s a crisis we must address if we’re going to have an exceptional nation with school systems free of systemic oppression.
We need to take it to heart. We need to act on Dr. Berry’s message. It’s a message she’s deeply passionate about.
As an educator, speaker, and author, she focuses on the education of the most historically marginalized: culturally and linguistically diverse learners.
She has worked diligently for over 30 years to help marginalized learners, learners of color, of linguistic and cultural diversity in low-wealth urban school districts, experience higher academic achievements.
Dr. Berry is on a mission. A mission bigger than herself. A mission to change the conversation happening around the topics of education, equity, and intellectual emancipation for culturally and linguistically diverse learners.
But she can’t do it alone. So she’s looking for leaders to join her. Is that you?
If you’re nodding your head and saying “Yes!” as you read this, we invite you to subscribe and listen to The Educational Equity, Emancipation Podcast.
Educational Equity Emancipation
Episode 133: Healing Our Nation's Divisions Through Therapeutic Principles
In this thought-provoking episode, Dr. Almitra Berry welcomes seasoned psychotherapist Phyllis Levitt, author of the book "America in Therapy." Phyllis shares her unique perspective on applying therapeutic principles to address the growing divisions impacting our children and communities. She emphasizes the importance of understanding family dynamics, addressing trauma, and fostering a culture of healing to transform our schools and society.
This insightful conversation explores practical ways to support the mental health and wellbeing of students, parents, and educators. Listeners can learn more about Phyllis Levitt and her work by visiting her website at https://www.phyllisleavitt.com, as well as connecting with her on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
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If you're a parent, teacher or school leader and you're sick and tired of the frustration, anger and unfair treatment of children at high risk in our public schools, then perhaps it's time for all of us to do something about it. In this podcast, Dr amitra Berry brings you tips, tools, strategies and tactics to build successful solutions while touching, moving and inspiring all of us to transform our schools so that every child thrives. Here's your host, Dr Bennett,
Dr Almitra Berry:hey, there equity warriors. Today, I welcome Phyllis Levitt to the 3e podcast. Phyllis is a seasoned psychotherapist with over 30 years of experience. She's recently authored a book called America in therapy, a new approach to hope and healing for a nation in crisis. She's here to share her unique perspective on applying therapeutic principles to heal our nation's growing divisions that are impacting our children and create a more loving and sustainable world for them to inherit. Phyllis, thanks so much for joining me today. Well,
Unknown:thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here with you.
Dr Almitra Berry:Can you start by sharing, and you know, I don't do a full bio, and everybody our listeners know that that bio is in the link, but I'd like for you to share something from your life that is pivotal, that helps shape why you do what you do, how it influenced your work, and how you came up to write the book America in therapy. Because Lord knows we need it. Lord knows we
Unknown:need it. I agree. Yeah. I mean, I, like so many people, had some very significant trauma in my early childhood that really shaped my life in ways that I had no way to understand. Nobody talked about psychology. I actually didn't remember most of what happened to me until I was much older, and so I had no idea why I had the pain that I had, why I felt so alone in the midst of other people, and I really came to believe that there was just something intrinsically wrong with me. And it wasn't until I began to remember what happened and did some significant therapy myself that I started to come out from under the shadow of some of the very painful things that had happened to me, but also it made me realize how many people in this world are suffering with no access to either understanding what, what's bothering them, what's causing their dysfunction or their inability to really thrive in life, and many people who don't even get rescue from what hurts them, and they're ongoingly symptomatic, and we live in a society that tends to blame our symptoms our victims. We tend to blame our victims for their symptoms without really understanding how sensitive we are as human beings and how deeply we can be impacted by the harmful behaviors of other people. So out of my own healing process, I became a therapist, and then I decided to write this book, because I worked so much with family systems. Whether you're working with an individual person or a family or a child or a couple, you're always working with their family systems. What conditioned them? What were the role models of behavior, what were the significant experiences people had growing up that really shaped the way that they feel about themselves, the beliefs they have, the expectations they have for themselves and for other people. And the more dysfunctional or harmful those family dynamics are, the more dysfunctional we tend to be, not everybody, and some people are like miracles, and they just rise from the ashes on their own. But what I realized being a therapist is that many more people don't, and we have some policies and practices going on in our homes, in our communities and from our largest institutions, including government, that really hurt a lot of people and then blame them because they're not thriving in our society. So one of you know one of the things that I love, and I love that you're talking about education. I wish that someone had taught a psychology course when I was in high school. Our human relations are the most important thing that we can actually focus on, how we treat each other, how we can learn to treat each other better. I think should be, you know, just up there with reading, writing and arithmetic and all the things that we that we do teach, that are obviously important. But I think human relations really needs to take center stage today.
Dr Almitra Berry:Yeah, you know, Phyllis, one of the things I talk about all the time, what I've written about, it's in my books, is that the culture of our classrooms is key to our children feeling comfortable and wanting to learn. And you know, even though I say I went to a Teacher's College. College back in the Dark Ages. At this point, it was several decades ago, clearly, but there was only one I we only took one class in educational psychology, one course in ed psych, which did not deal with mental health of our children or their backgrounds. Now maybe it's changed. I always invite my listeners if I'm wrong, if there's something new. If there's something I ought to know, direct message me. Send me a message. I use that, that link down in the show notes to send me a text, but get a hold of me and let me know what's going on. And you know, maybe even come on the show. But I just don't think it's enough, given what is happening in our society today, and as we talk about about psychotherapy and healing and trauma in the context of K 12 education, I want to sort of hone in on a couple of things that I'm hoping that you can help my listeners, and particularly not just the educators, but the parents who listen to this show as well. And so another thing I often highlight, and I'm hoping that you can support me in this is that black and brown communities in particular tend to poopoo therapy. And so if we're talking about many of our most marginalized learners, not just our black and brown and indigenous populations, but our LGD, LGBTQ students as well, and our children that are are trying to figure out who they are when they're there. They're dealing with these feelings that they have, that people tell them are not normal. What do parents let's start with them. What should our parents be doing?
Unknown:Well, one of the things, I mean, a couple of things I want to say. I hope I don't forget them. One of them is, is that I think many, many, many people feel powerless in our society, and more and more so as power gets held at the very top, as more as fewer people have more control over more people and as the general population, in some ways, has less and less of a voice, not in all ways, certainly like podcasting and writing books and talking and, you know, starting movements, there's, there's still a place for us to have a voice. But many people really feel powerless, economically, racially, religiously, gender wise, as you're saying. And I think that makes therapy feel threatening, because our association with therapy and healing, the healing arts, is somehow that it's still, I think the stigma is still that it's a sign of weakness. You shouldn't need anybody you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, be tough and, and I think many people feel that they have to be tough in this society to survive and, and I think what many people don't understand is that going to therapy and really dealing with what wounded you and trying to heal the worst effects of the things that happen to you with other people. Because genuinely, it's what generally, it's with other people that we get hurt is actually takes great strength. It takes great strength, it takes courage. It's hard work, and it's worth every bit of it, because inside, I truly believe that inside every human being is an essential self that is loving and kind, if given the opportunity to express themselves and their full potential in the world. And so you know, for your listeners, I just want to say that for people who have felt like they have to be tough in order to survive, getting help to heal is actually a sign of strength and embrace it, because we need each other to heal. Nobody's an island. I know because I felt like an island and it was a horrible place to be. It's just, it's because we don't have the answers ourselves. And one of the things that I've learned as a therapist is that, as I said, most of us have been hurt by other people who you know came by their dysfunctional behaviors from their own wounding that they never got a chance to heal. And we have to heal with other people. We need the love and belonging and safety and valuing by other people to heal. So that's one of the things that I wanted to say about that. And then you you were talking about acceptance of Sorry, what was the second part of your question?
Dr Almitra Berry:Well, I wanted you to talk to like to parents, but also to educators in this environment that we're in, I don't know. And I said, then I'm so intently listening, hanging on every word that you're saying about what we should do, and then I've got other questions popping up in my head. Don't worry about it. We'll come back to it for sure. I'm sure it'll circle around, if you're like me, soon as you're not trying to remember what it was gonna be. Oh, now, now I remember. So feel free to interrupt um, I think
Unknown:about, oh, I do know. I do remember. So what I wanted to share with parents is this, but a. Apart from what's going on in the culture that is really impacting both parents and children, from social media, from politics, from the role models that we're seeing, some of which are highly dysfunctional. I started my practice working with children. I wanted to just work with children. That was my commitment when I began, but what I found was 99.9% of the children that were referred to me for therapy were suffering from conflict in their home. There wasn't really anything wrong with these children, but they were highly symptomatic, bed Wendy, night terrors, aggression towards siblings and other children becoming a bully or isolating and having no friends, having excessive fears, getting into drugs and alcohol, young and you know, associating with kids who were also suffering and acting out in in disturbed ways. And every, almost every single one of those children was suffering from a very conflictual divorce, ongoing fighting in the home, addiction in the home, unavailability a parent who had left, there was a divorce, and the parent just left, and the children felt abandoned, but most of it was conflict in the home, ongoing conflict. And so the work really became with the parents. There wasn't really anything wrong with these children. They were showing the symptoms of the family dysfunction, and so that's one of the things that I really want to talk to parents about, because a lot of these parents really didn't understand that they're fighting between each other or the tension in the home or the unresolved divorce or the custody battle was tearing their children apart, and they were showing the symptoms of the family pain. So often in the school system, you see these kids acting out or becoming isolated or associating with other kids who are acting out or just failing to thrive in school period, because their little psyches are overcome with the distress that they're suffering from at home, and to say nothing of poverty or racial discrimination that's happening on a larger scale or in the school system, yeah. So one of my messages is to parents, is you're having an incredible impact on your children, and if you're suffering, if you're depressed, if you're in high levels of conflict, if you're suffering from addiction or high levels of anxiety or your own social isolation, the one of the very best things you can do for your children is heal yourself, get help, if not for yourself, for the sake of your Children, but really for both and you deserve it. Parenting is really tough in this society and in this culture. And if you need to reach out for some help and some support, you deserve it. We all need to be held by safe other people.
Dr Almitra Berry:Yeah, I think about the again. Now I've got 10 more questions that I didn't plan on asking you. So I'm really gonna have to rein myself in here. One of the things I want to say before I forget is we're talking about the different avenues and ways that people can get therapy, certainly by reading your book. But I also know that I have a population of there is a big population in our community that doesn't read anymore, and so however, we can get information into them. Obviously, podcasting is one, but we often leave our children. You know, if parents are resistant, children don't have the avenues. And as educators, we may not know what to do. So I'm going to this is a non paid advertisement for a prior guest that I had on the show, and that is a company by the name of alongside. I always think of the llama when I when I see alongside. But if you are a counselor or an educator and you're looking for ways to reach your children where their parents may not get help and you don't have anything set up in your schools, I would encourage you to check out alongside, which is an app that kids can have on their phone you can have on devices in the school, and they literally create their own they have their own little llama that they talk to, but it's an AI powered system where a kid can simply tap into their app. I'm having a really rough day today, and through that AI, they go through a little bit of mini therapy. It may recommend that they do some breathing exercises or some meditation, but it has a background built into it, so that when it is signaling a child is signaling that they are truly in crisis, it's going to connect them with an adult with a suicide hotline, with resources and the school is alerted so that a human being, a counselor, a responsible adult on campus, can get to that child and intervene appropriately. So I just, I can't say enough about alongside as an app. I'll put a link in the notes down for that information as well, if you're if there's anyone listening who's curious about it, but I think about the stress that our teachers are under as. Well, there's so much going on. And the one thing that keeps coming to mind every time I think about mental health and stress and wellness in our school systems right now is the violence, the school shootings. Just name the thing that is the number of school shootings and the fact that every single child in America schools right now has had one or two or three, depending on when you're listening to this active shooter drills at their school. Now, when I was a kid, we had duck and cover. I was in California. We had it for two reasons. One, we had it for earthquakes. That so that if there was an earthquake, we knew to get up underneath our desks to, you know, sort of bend over, crouch down, cover our necks and make sure that we had we if we were gonna get hit, we had covered our head and our necks, right? Cover those, those most important, most important parts. The other reason we had them, which, as I think back now, it makes me laugh that it was during the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, right? Fellas, you remember that? And so the idea that there would be a nuclear blast and we were going to save ourselves by ducking under our desk was, it was absurd, right? But what our kids, you know? And we were, we were, I don't think we were terribly traumatized by that, but it wasn't. We didn't live under a daily threat or hearing in the news day after day. And right now in this country, the last time I looked there was a school shooting every six weeks, and our kids are hearing about this in the news. Our parents are hearing about it. But Phyllis, I have a grandson who is a junior in high school this year, and my daughter was just livid that the school had enacted a cell phone ban this year, and her fear was, as many parents fear is, what if there's a school shooting and I can't find my child and he can't send me a text message? This, this every day, additional psychological burden that's on our children as young as kindergarten. It's on every parent. It's on every teacher. How do we begin? This was not a question. I didn't, I didn't prepare for this one, but I know you've got an answer. How do we begin to heal, to to live with this situation, because I don't think it's going away anytime soon, not without people voting the right way and legislators enacting bans against assault weapons. What do we do in terms of our mental health and living in in this this current climate?
Unknown:Well, I think one of the huge challenges of the current climate, which I didn't grow up in. You know, this is very different. What we're looking at now is that there's a lot of violence in homes, as well as coming down from larger institutions or policies that don't really protect people or even advocate protecting people, which I think is very, very sad. So there's this sort of this mergence of a lot of a lot of families are under incredible stress, and it plays out in their home life and in children feel that tension, whether it's economic, as we were talking about, or racial or addiction, or whatever it is. So families are already under stress, exposure to a lot of what's in the social media and the news is an inordinate amount of stress. The role models of behavior coming down from the top are sometimes just horrific. So I think we have to address it on all levels, which I think is an enormous challenge. You can't just say there's one cause, because I think what's going on in the home and in the community and what's going on in the country at large are really interconnected and they reflect each other. So one of the big things that I talk about, and there is no one answer, but I think, I think the best minds, if we bring the best minds together from science, from psychology, from sociology, from education, from medicine. You know, because all these fields are really interconnected, our bodies are are affected by the tensions, right? So high blood
Dr Almitra Berry:pressure, all of these, these, there are so many. There are so many physical things that we exhibit because of the mental trauma and stress. So
Unknown:I think, you know, I think, instead of, I think one of the big things, so again, there's like, a million answers to your question, and I think they all need to be looked at together. But one of them is, you know, when there's a school shooting, for instance, and some of this is out there, but I don't think it's really like the conversation when there is a school shooting, we have to look deeply into the history of the shooter, because there is so much evidence now that many of these people who commit these mass shootings are terribly disturbed from. Like had horrible experiences in their childhood, sexual abuse, physical abuse, religious or racial persecution, poverty, abandonment and because people are not born, mass shooters, they're not they're made. They're made, very carefully made. Yes, we have to take responsibility as a society for what we're experiencing. We can't just keep blaming the shooter or even blaming their family. The suffering in their families often is also directly related to what's going on on a society level and and I think so it's, it's it's not okay in my mind, as a mental health professional, should just say, Oh, another mass shooting. Five people were killed. We have to talk about the roots of this kind of severe disconnection. I mean, try to even imagine which I can't totally the mental state of someone who would pick up an assault weapon with with the intent to go kill children that they don't even know? Yeah, yes. It has to be a terribly disturbed mental state, terribly disconnected from their own humanity, probably in enormous pain and rage, among other things. And we have to look at the roots of that if we really want to solve this mass shooting epidemic. Yes, I think you know, looking at an assault weapons ban or gun control or background checks, all those things are important, but the truth is, if you put an AK 47 in the hands of a mentally healthy person. They're not going to kill anyone. Yeah, so it's not it's not the weapons alone. It's the mental state of a person who feels like they have no other way to somehow express their rage or their pain or something. And I think we just really have to look at what is the mental health of our country, and that's why I wrote America in therapy, like our country, needs to look at the roots of our own violence. When a family comes to therapy, if there's been violence, that's what we do. We don't do it with a hate, blame, retaliation, humiliation lens. We do it with a lens to try to heal What happened to you that you hit your kid? What happened to you that you went on a screaming rampage? What happened to you that you broke, that, you know, smashed that thing in front of your wife or your husband or whatever? What happened to you? What? What's the pain in there? What's the anger in there? So
Dr Almitra Berry:Phyllis, can I ask you to take what you just said and boil that down. I have two things, but I want you to sort of boil that down if we, if, if, if it's not a family, but a school system, whether it's a an elementary school, a middle school, a high school or an entire school district, right? If that's the family, what are the questions that the That family has to ask of itself? What are the questions that our superintendents and principals, our school leaders should be asking for their institutions to be in therapy as a family? Well,
Unknown:it is, and one of, one of the things that I talk about is that they're all families. School is a system, a business as a family system and a government as a family system, because we take our family dynamics with us wherever we go. So people who are invested in being one up and being in power usually seek positions of power and authority, and people who are used to submitting and feeling like they have to obey will often be very submissive in those family systems. So I think, I think we have to bring our knowledge of how families actually work. What are the qualities of a healthy family? What are the qualities, the symptoms and the behaviors of a dysfunctional or abusive family, and examine all of our family systems. You know. So in a school system, if a child is being taunted or bullied because of the color of their skin or their gender or their their religion or whatever about them, and they try to get help and nobody's listening, that's this one of the same dynamics in a dysfunctional family, where you can't get help, nobody who hears you, or they don't believe you, or they don't take you seriously, or they blame you. What did you do that caused that? I mean, I've heard these stories from parents about how their children were treated by those in authority at the school where their complaints weren't taken seriously. What did you do that caused this? Oh, you know, let it just roll off your back. Don't pay any attention if somebody calls you some, you know, racial slur, that kind of thing. And so I think we have to look at the same qualities. So I'll just say now, and we know this, what I say is that the psychology and the best psychotherapy hold the. Answers that are hidden in plain sight. We know everything I'm going to say, we're just not committed to implementing it. So say that again.
Dr Almitra Berry:That is really important. Say it again. Please, know exactly
Unknown:what's needed. We're just not committed as a society to implementing it. And it's, I think it's really true. I don't have anything to say that you don't know it's just not the way we're operating. So in a healthy family, you feel loved, you feel like you're wanted, you feel like you belong in a safe way, that if you have a complaint, someone is going to listen to you. You may not get what you want, but you're going to be heard with respect. You know, a child who wants to stay up till midnight may not get that from their parents, but they're also not going to be smacked because they said that they're going to be. You know, honey, I know you want to stay up till midnight, but you can't. You know, you have school tomorrow. You got to go to bed. You know what I'm saying, in a healthy family, you know, if you have children, anybody out there has children, you know, your children are very different. One might be really athletic, one's artistic, one's more introverted, the other is a big extrovert. You know, they're born with these with our natural tendencies and variations. So in a healthy family, there's not only tolerance of our diversity, but there's celebration of it. Wow, you're amazing at baseball and you know, so and so just loves pets. You know, we don't have to be great. We just have to be a firm for who we are in a healthy family, we cooperate with each other the very best we can. And one of the things and everything I'm saying, of course, I want you to apply to the family of America, or to a school or to a business, and one of the big, big, big characteristics of a healthy family is there is a commitment to non violent communication and conflict resolution. Healthy family. People don't smack each other around, they don't beat each other up, they don't sexually assault. They don't lock somebody in a basement or out of the house. We don't do these violent things when we've had a chance to be loved and feel that we belong safely ourselves, and when you see generation after generation of violence passed down from one, you know, set of parents to their children and on and on, you know that there's deep healing that needs to happen for the violence that generated the violence. Just take that. Violence begets violence. We know this, and yet, as a country, we haven't adopted
Dr Almitra Berry:the antidote. The most violent nations in the world, the highest incarceration rate in the world, it is not working. I know as a you know as an educator, and I think back to when I first started teaching, before I learned that the faculty lounge was not necessarily the most mentally healthy place to hang out. But here's what I do know, is that from from being in that space is that teachers, more than anyone else, recognize which children are hurting right because of their behaviors. I know that teachers can tell you when they've read the paper where there's been something horrible happened, and that was a child who had passed through their classrooms. I can't tell you how many times I heard someone say, well, I could have told you that about that one, right? My appeal right now to educators, specifically, when you know that you feel that about that child, whether they're in kindergarten or fifth grade or a senior in high school, that there needs to be a mechanism administrators for teachers to be able to go and say, there's something going on with this child, right? I feel it. I see it. I can tell from their behaviors, this is what they're doing, and there needs to be an intervention. But I think we are so short of counselors in our schools, or of ways to address that for fear of whatever that it's just not happening, and what happens with that child or to that child, or what that child does to someone else further down the road. Instead of us saying, I could have told you about that one, we need to say we did everything we could, because we could see that coming,
Unknown:right and and I would, I 100% agree with you, one of the horrifying things that I read, I looked up a little bit about the Uvalde shooter when I was writing my book, And he before he committed that mass murder. His nickname was the school shooter. How much more obvious could it possibly be? So I totally agree with that, and I think, but I think we have to embrace a spirit of this kid needs help, not with a bad kid. This kid needs help. And most likely, his family or her family, needs help. And I think we have to look at it like that. Instead of getting out. We have to get out of this blame and retaliation kind of mindset like this is a bad kid, and it's just a bad family. We have to help people, and I think more people would come forward. If that the spirit that we're going to help you, you might have to restrain you because you're a danger, but the the goal is still to help you and restore you to some sense of inner safety and outer safety.
Dr Almitra Berry:Yeah, you know, and I have these conversations, Phyllis, and just in in listening to what you're saying, even though it's been 20 years since I've 20 years, yeah, 20 little over 20 years since I've been a classroom teacher, I can still see those children that I was concerned about from a Mental health perspective. I can still very vividly see my own terror at because of the behavior of a student that I had who, in his essay spewed a lot of ugly, racist things and said that essentially, he was going to make sure that me and all of my kind were wiped off the face of the earth. I did take action. I did take it to administration. They removed him from my classroom. Did not provide any assistance to him, and it was just a few weeks later that he beat his mother to a pulp, right? We know, and that's why I say teachers. We know when those, when we have children who are hurting, who are disturbed, for lack of a better term, that there is something going on that needs an intervention, and we need to find ways to intervene and provide assistance so that no one gets hurt, including the child themself. Absolutely
Unknown:and we really need to create a culture that is not blaming and shaming and retaliatory, which is the culture that a lot of us are living in right now and hearing proliferated in the media and in a culture of healing, like you were born an essential, beautiful human being, and whatever happened to you, we're going to look into and address,
Dr Almitra Berry:yeah, I think one of the, I think one, one of the challenges with that. And I always, you know, sort of horribly jokingly say that, you know, Florida is like the gift that keeps on giving in the current political environment when it comes to education. But there are states where socio emotional wellness, where we're developing our own socio emotional skills as children is forbidden as instruction, instructional content in the classroom that we cannot have. We cannot teach children those skills to learn those what we call soft skills as an adult, right? How do I get along with others and expressing myself and dealing with my own challenges and traumas and pains and whatever that we cannot teach that in the classroom.
Unknown:I think that's a tragedy. I think it's a tragedy for all those children. I think it's a tragedy for America. I think it's a tragedy for the world. Because really, and this is what was mind boggling to me, the risks of not teaching us how to get along with each other grow higher every single day. I was on a call with someone just last week, I think it was or the week before, and while I was on the call with them, their child called and said there was a bomb threat at their school or shooting threat at their school, and they were terrified. It's, it's while I was writing my book about the mass shootings, a news flash came up on my computer that there had been yet another school shooting. And I think, I think what, what, what I really had wanted to add in when I was talking about the children that I worked with that were really suffering from conflict in the home. We're all suffering from the conflict in our country. Yes, yeah. To them. Children look at, you know, this child's calling their parents on their cell phone saying, in a threat against my school, come get me.
Dr Almitra Berry:Yeah, yeah. And it's beyond. I know school shootings is, is probably the most traumatic thing we can think of that's impacting our children in schools. But there's, there's another one that's a little bit softer, and I want to make sure that we touch on that, and that is the stress that surrounds something that is as as common, it's everywhere, and that is high stakes testing. As we get into testing season each year, and the way that we approach it, the way that test scores are sort of held over the heads of school districts and administrators, and the stress that teachers then for fear of their own jobs, right, that the teachers are under stress, but then we push that. Stress down onto the children. And so you think about for a child, if testing starts at second grade in most states, third grade by third grade at all states that for nine years, every single year, like clockwork, they can expect to have this tremendous amount of stress placed on them for a flipping test. Um,
Unknown:well, I think we're testing the wrong things. Yeah, find out about your math skills and your social studies skills, and, you know, whatever you know, your grammar skills. Find out about those things, fine, but that's not what keeps people alive. What keeps people alive and healthy is their human relations. And so I think we're testing, you know, I think we're not measuring what we actually really need to measure. I think we're not teaching a lot of what needs to be taught, like you were talking about, you know, taking human relations out of the curriculum. What could be more deleterious to the child, to the school and to the human race? I don't know. And that's why I wrote a whole book about mental health. It's like, I feel like it is the number one national priority that we're just missing. We're missing. And so, yeah, I think I mean, and there are actually a lot of things that can't be tested and don't need to be tested. You don't need to test how well somebody gets along with each other, you know, with with other people. We need to just foster that environment, and we need to foster an environment where you're not judged by the score you get on that test, you know. And it's a place for there's a place for learning your math skills, and especially if you want to become an engineer or a chemist or a doctor, you need those skills, and they're important, and we need them in their place, in their place. Of how much are we actually safe for one another, serving one another with the skills that we have, or are we like cutthroat to get into an Ivy League school? Yeah,
Dr Almitra Berry:I talk about and write about in my book, matter of fact, the upcoming book that'll be out this spring, the components, or the elements of psychological safety in creating an inclusive classroom and making every child feel valued and welcomed and affirmed for who they are and just being a human being. That's right, that that first layer of psychological safety has to be in place in every single classroom. That's a benefit, not just to the children, but to the teacher as well. That's having a space that you want to come to work in every single day, and then, you know, yes, that needs to sort of, it's not filter, but, you know, be siphoned up the the the system of schools, so that school as as a whole is a psychologically safe to be, safe space, to be and to work, to show up every day, and for administrators that the district environment is psychologically safe, but if we don't do those things, we cannot, my opinion, we cannot begin to heal as a classroom, as a school, as a district, a community, a state, a nation.
Unknown:And I also think it's the best learning environment, when people feel safe when children feel safe, when they feel like they're wanted and they belong, and they come into the room and it's like, hi. You know, so glad you're here today and we missed you because you were out sick. That's the best learning environment for all of us, whether we're children or adults. You know, that's where we thrive, and that's why we talk about the characteristics of a healthy family, because it produces people who are loving, who are kind, who want to work out the conflicts without hurting each other. And we can start teaching that in our classrooms, not even as a course necessarily, but just as a way of being right. And then the other thing that just to go along with that, if there's when there's children who have learned prejudice, who have learned hatred in their home, who come to school and then target, you know, a minority or a marginalized other child for abuse, or some kind of, you know, slurs or whatever they do to taunt and provoke, and someone reports that that child needs help, yes, well, you know, not just you know, well, often it's ignored and nothing happens or they're suspended. But that's not the answer. The answer is to, like, look into where they're learning these hateful behaviors and really try to address that on a family level. And of course, that's a massive job. But what better job do we have?
Dr Almitra Berry:There's that and there's restorative practices in schools as well, right? And if we can marry those two things, I think that would be a tremendous, tremendous help to healing taking place in our in our in our schools, in our classrooms. Yeah. Phyllis is there? You talk about the characteristics of a healthy family, and I want to make sure that my listeners are wrapping their heads around maybe one or two that are most important. Can you give us what you think are the most two most important characteristics there? Well, one
Unknown:of the things that I want to say is nobody does it perfectly. We all have our own wounds that we're working out. So there's no ideal way to be the perfect family, because we're just not that. We're human beings. We have our own wounds that we're healing. We have our own conditioning that we're still working with. So I'm not trying to hold up a model of perfection. I think one of the characteristics of a healthy family that is fundamentally loving, kind, supportive and committed to non violence. Let's just say one of the characteristics is that when we fall down, when we're not our best selves, when we did yell at our kid and we didn't mean to or we weren't as sensitive to somebody in pain as we would like to be, we come back and we try again. There's no perfection. There's the perfection is that we get up and we try again and we try to do it better. You know, I say we love each other and we keep learning how to love each other better.
Dr Almitra Berry:Wow, that's beautiful. I ask every guest the same question. There's this one consistent question, and it comes as sort of paraphrase from Dr Angela Davis, who said that she is changing the things she cannot accept. So I ask every guest, what is that something that you cannot accept? And then what should listeners be doing to help support changing that?
Unknown:I think the one thing that I just cannot accept is violence. I just cannot accept that. And I feel like it's I really feel like if there's one challenge for the human race, Americans, in our families, in our government and in the world, it's that we have to find a way to resolve our differences and our conflicts without violence. I think that's the biggest challenge, because the ways that we can hurt each other now, could cause the whole human race to go extinct? And do we need more motivation than that? I just don't think so.
Dr Almitra Berry:Wow, that is beautiful and deep. Give us all something to think about. I'm going to make sure that we have all of your information as well as the link to the book on Amazon down in the show notes. So folks again, the book is America, America in therapy. Dr, Phyllis, leave it, Phyllis, thank you. Thank you so much for joining me today, and I hope everyone takes heed of the things that Phyllis has said and work to find ways to bring healing to your community and then join me again next episode. As always, if you've got a question, a topic you want covered, a special request, another question for Phyllis or any other guests who's been on the show, make sure that you text me, because I do want to hear those stories. And then always remember, don't worry about the things you cannot change. Change the things you can no longer accept and that's a wrap for today's episode of the 3e podcast. Now here's how you can make a real difference. First, smash that subscribe button. It's free. It's easy, just do it. Second, share the show with anyone you know who cares about education. And third, consider becoming a supporter of the show. Together, we're not just talking about change. We're making it happen. Make a donation today to be part of that mission and change, and I'll catch you next time you.
