Monthly Archives: July 2021

Stress & Strain in the Classroom

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Stress is a bitter part of any job. Even a job that is not stressful can cause stress from boredom. Teaching can be a stressful occupation as teachers have to deal with many unique individuals with distinct personalities. This post will look at stress, how people deal with it, and the types of negative stress.

Stress & Strain

Stress is the physical and emotional responses people have to various aspects and experiences within their environment. Stress can be harmful, which we call distress, or it can be positive, called eustress. Examples of distress in the classroom can include disruptive students, marking assignments, or dealing with parents. Examples of eustress can include working with engaged students, developing new teaching methods, and learning something new to share with students.

When teachers experience stress, it can lead to something called strain. Strain is the damage inflicted on a person because of stress. In other words, strain is the cumulative effect of stress. It is not one or two stressful moments that wear a teacher down but rather the stress over time.

Stress is pervasive in a classroom as dealing with young people generally is. However, no two people handle stress the same way. Some strive in a stressful environment while others struggle tremendously. One person’s classroom of chaos is another person’s classroom of collaboration. However, there is a model of how people respond to stress.

General Adaptation Syndrome

General adaptation syndrome is the name for the steps people take to deal with stress. The three steps are…

  1. Alarm
  2. Resistance
  3. Exhausation 

Alarm is the initial response to stress and is often known as the “fight or flight” experience. In the classroom, this can be a teacher reacting to students arguing over something. Step two is resistance and is how a person tries to return to a state of equilibrium. For example, when the teacher notices the arguing, the intervening to break up the fighting and get everyone back on task. Lastly, exhaustion results from experiencing the first two steps and represents the long-term effects of stress such as illness or high blood pressure.

Types of Negative Stress

There is positive and negative stress. Under negative stress, there are also two types, which are frustration and anxiety. Frustration is a person’s reaction to not being able to achieve a goal. For example, a teacher is excited about teaching a new concept or idea to the students, only for the students to be completely disruptive. Since the teacher cannot teach, it is probably that frustration will set in that can lead to exhaustion or, worst.

Anxiety is a sense of helpless to rise to the challenge of a stressful situation. For example, if a class gets out of control, a teacher may experience anxiety as they have no idea how to handle that current situation. Anxiety can also happen in a novel situation. For example, an experienced teacher may suffer anxiety when dealing with their first special needs child or a challenging child.

Conclusion

Even though stress is a reality for a teacher, it does not have to take and lead to discouragement. Understanding what stress is and how it manifests itself is one practical way to deal with this enemy of teaching.

WHERE, LIKE, IN Commands SQL VIDEO

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In this video, ERT will explain how to filter data in SQL. Often, we want results but we don’t want everything the database can provide us. This can be because its too much information but also because getting everything can take a long time with larger database. For these and other reasons we will learn how to use some of the Filtering commands in SQL.

Adjusting to the Classroom for Teachers and Students

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Adjusting to the workplace or school is a challenge for teachers and students. This post will look at five ways people respond to the adjustment, as first researched by W.S. Neff.

No Motivation

The first type of person who struggles in the classroom is a person who has no motivation. They have a negative view of their role in the classroom and want to avoid work to avoid discomfort.

Teachers who lack motivation are often considered to be suffering from burnout. In other words, these were teachers who use to be on fire but have struggled to keep the flame burning. Burnout and loss of motivation have also become acute problems with the move to online learning. Essentially some teachers have lost motivation because they are struggling to cope with the changes in teaching that have hit the entire world.

It is more common to see students who lack motivation. In an entertainment-driven world, sitting still in class is challenging and lacks relevance for many young people. With learning online, it can be even more torturous to have to endure sitting in front of the computer for hours. Some students have to study through their small cellphone for hours each day.

The Fearful

Some people respond with fear and or anxiety about coping with work or school. The stress and demands of work can weigh heavily upon them. Teachers, as an example, may be worried about students who have real and severe problems. They also may be struggling with the workload of teaching as they try and support dozens of students at any given moment.

Any student can suffer from anxiety and fear about the school, but students who suffer from bullying and/or high performers are often at risk for this. The bullied student has to worry about the people who are mistreating them, while the high performer is worried about maintaining high performance.

The Hostile Ones

Some react with anger and aggression towards stress. These are the people who are identified as having a short temper and are hard to get along with. Such individuals dislike the strain of their role by attacking those around them. Teachers do this, but it can be challenging to keep a position long-term with this sort of behavior.

Students also do this, and given their age; there is more effort to work with them through aggressive, emotional issues. Students are already dealing with change as they mature into adults, and coping with their role at school could cause problems. For example, students who have family problems may also act aggressive at school as they try and cope with the issues they face at home.

Dependency

 People who become dependent cannot take the initiative for anything and have a sense of helplessness. For a teacher, this can manifest itself with a lack of decisiveness in the classroom and unclear instruction. The teacher is so overwhelmed that they literally cannot think and make choices. Anybody who is in a highly stressful situation will look for guidance to attain the stability and/or safety that they crave, which happens to some teachers.

Dependency among students can happen if they lack support at home. When home support is missing, friends are often the ones who provide stability. These students turn to friends for advice and decision-making in place of what could be provided by parents.

Socially Naive

Some people have no idea how their actions affect those around them. They have no clue about the feelings and needs of others. These individuals are classified as socially naive. Task-oriented teachers and students often fall into this category. They are so focused on achieving something that they lose track of the people around them.

Introverts can also suffer from being socially naive as they have their minds that they are trying to keep track of and thus do not focus on what is happening in the heads of others as much.

Helping these Types

There is no single way to help people who fall into one of the examples above. It takes a holistic view of the life of the teacher or student to determine how to help them. Teachers often want to do at least the minimum to keep their jobs (hopefully). Therefore, if they are not even meeting the lowest standard, exploring causes can help them rebound in performance.

Students are more complicated as they often do not have the life burdens of bills and family. As such, they can be in a perfectly stable environment and still not perform or care as the struggles of reality have not hit them yet. In such a situation, it will take serious work to help them.

Conclusion

Everybody is different, and we all respond in different ways to the same situations. This post provided five types of roles people assume when coping with stress.

WHERE, LIKE and IN Commands for SQL

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This post will explore the use and application of the WHERE, LIKE, and IN commands in SQL.

WHERE

The WHERE command is generally used as a way to filter data in SQL. The database we are using in this post contains data on basketball players from 1950-2017. What we want to do is filter the data so that we only see data from players who played in 2017. In the example below, we will filter our basketball players by year be set to 2017

SELECT *
FROM Seasons_Stats
WHERE year = 2017

If you look at the year column you can clearly see that the value is set to 2017 just as we wanted it.

The WHERE command is not limited to numbers as it can also be used with text. In the example below, we filter our data with the WHERE command so that we only see players who played for the Golden State Warriors (GSW).

SELECT *
FROM Seasons_Stats
WHERE Tm = 'GSW'

If you look closely at the “Tm” column you will only see the initials for the Golden State Warriors.

LIKE

The WHERE command is often teamed with the LIKE command when you are looking for a text but are not sure of an exact match. You can specify a pattern you are looking for similar to regular expressions. In the code below we use the LIKE command with the WHERE command searching for any player whose name begins with L.

SELECT *
FROM Seasons_Stats
WHERE Player LIKE 'L%'

The percentage sign (%) after the letter L tells SQL that anything can be after the letter L in the search and meet the criteria. We can also put the % at the end of or text or put one on both sides are some other combination as shown in the examples below.

In the example below, the last letter must be an L. After this example, is one in which an L must appear anywhere in the name.

SELECT *
FROM Seasons_Stats
WHERE Player LIKE '%L'
SELECT *
FROM Seasons_Stats
WHERE Player LIKE '%L%'

IN

The IN command allows you to filter your data based on several values. This command is also combined with the WHERE command. In the example below, we filter our data so that we only see players whose position is small forward or shooting guard. 

SELECT *
FROM Seasons_Stats
WHERE Pos in  ('SG', 'SF')

You could also insert numerical values in the parentheses when using the IN command.

Conclusion

The command shared in this post provide more information on basic tools you can use and apply in SQL. Filtering using the WHERE, LIKE, and IN commands get helpo you to focus the breath of your research to find answers to your questions.

Intro to SQL VIDEO

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For those who may not be familiar with this, this video will provide a brief intro to SQL. We will look at a few commands as we begin our journey learning how to navigate databases and the SQL programming language.

Kotter’s Change Model and Schools

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This post will look at Kotter’s Change model, another model of change for an organization. In all, there are eight steps for this process, as shared below. There will also be several brief examples of how one educational leader has perhaps unknowingly used this model, at least in part.

Establish Urgency

Step one of bringing change, according to Kotter, is to develop a sense of urgency. Since most people are emotional by nature, they may need an emotional push to accept and work for change. Urgency can be developed through creating a narrative about why change is necessary and sharing some of the prophesied consequences if change does not happen.

I once worked with an administrator, and we will call him Jim, who was a complete master of establishing urgency. Whenever he wanted something done, Jim was sure to mention how the entire school was endanger if what he wanted was not done. However, because everything he wanted was a “do or die” scenario, people started to ignore him. What happened to him is similar to “the boy who cried wolf” or chicken little and the sky is falling.” Urgency can be a great tool, but it must be used sparingly; otherwise, it will lose its power to mobilize.

Form Coalition

Once urgency is established, a leader needs to build a team of influential people within the organization to shape the change. The people involved in this colation should be influencers who are affected by the change. These people serve as local go-to contacts to influence the masses within the institution to support and make change happen.

Jim was also an expert at building coalitions. When he wanted to change, he knew he needed help and had the political acumen to build complex alliances. One mistake I think he made was that sometimes he would team with people who were established and influential but maybe not popular. When unpopular people are pushing change, it is often rejected because people often value relationships over performance.

Make a Vision and Communicate it

Once the team is in place, they work together with the leader to develop the scope and rationale for change. By scope, it is meant the breadth and depth of the change and rationale are the motives behind the change. Creating this vision helps the team determine what they are focusing on for a change and how they will know when they are successful.

Once the vision is set, it needs to be communicated with the institution. People need to know where they are going and how they will get there. Communication can help people to buy in and accept the change.

Jim was always good and sharing the vision even if nobody else contributed to it. Once his colation was aware of the plan, it was shared with the institution. One thing to be careful of is how much of the vision to share. If your plans are overly ambitious, people may be intimidated by what you want to do. Tell people enough to get things started and slowly reveal more details as small goals are achieved.

Remove Obstacles and Strive for Small Wins

Removing obstacles is about problem-solving. Whenever people try to accomplish anything, some surprises try to disrupt the process. The leader must solve these problems by providing training, resources, encouragement, supplies, etc., so that the vision can be achieved.

Small wins relate to sharing the vision. Many people struggle with the big picture as they are more detail-oriented. If you tell some people all the work they have to do, they will become discouraged. Breaking the large vision into small wins or goals is critical for managing people psychologically.

Small wins are created when the leader develops milestones that help to achieve the vision. These milestones are shorter and less complex in nature compared to whatever the final vision is. Therefore, they are easier to attain. When people begin to have success completing small goals for wins, it helps motivate many individuals.

Consolidate Improvements and Anchor Changes

Consolidation involves reinforcing what has worked well so far and removing what has not worked well. As success is experienced and momentum develops, people begin to get excited about the changes they have been a part of making happen. In other words, focus on sharing the success to help push people to finish the changes.

The final step is anchoring changes. Anchoring changes involves making what changes were made permanent. Doing this requires discipline to support change long-term. It is common for people to get so excited about the change that they do not make an effort to maintain the new normal. The same energy that was brought to bringing change must be used to maintain it.

Conclusion

Change is part of the journey of any institution. Having a process to guide the change process can help leaders who need to push for change. Kotter’s model for change is one tool for walking through change and making it a reality.

Intro to SQL

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SQL (structured query language) is a programming language used with databases. A database is essentially a collection of tables that all contain information in a text or numerical form. SQL can be used for developing and maintaining databases for various purposes. Our goal is not to learn how to become database administrators. Instead, we are going to focus on using SQL for data analysis.

The data used in this example is NBA Salary and Statistics 2016-17 (SQLite version), a database file available at Kaggle. This database contains information on basketball statistics from 1950-2017. There is more that could be said, but for simplicity, we will learn as we go along.

The software used to explore the database in these examples is DBeaver, a free, open-source software database manager. You can run SQL from a terminal, but it is a little bit easier for beginners to have a GUI interface most of the time. If you want to use this database, you can download it and connect this database to whatever database manager you are using.

In this post, we will focus on using the following commands.

  • SELECT
  • FROM
  • LIMIT
  • ORDER BY

SELECT and FROM

The SELECT and FROM commands almost always work together at the beginning of an SQL query. The SELECT command tables which column(s) you want SQL to pull from a table. The FROM command indicates which table you want to pull data from. Below is code and a screenshot of using these two commands together to pull data from the database.

SELECT * 

FROM Seasons_Stats

This is what the output looks like in DBeaver. What you see is different. The asterisk after SELECT tells SQL to pull all columns in the table. You can also see a combination of text and numeric data in the columns we can see.

LIMIT

The next command that we will learn is the LIMIT command. This command limits how many rows of data are returned for an output. The code and output are below.

SELECT * 

FROM Seasons_Stats

LIMIT 5

By using the LIMIT command, only five rows of data were pulled. How many rows you want is up to you, but this example was set to 5.

ORDER BY

The ORDER BY command allows you to sort the data from highest to lowest or vice versa based on one or more columns in the table. In the example below, we will sort the data by the age column descending to determine who are some of the oldest players to play in the NBA since 1950, which is the first year data is available in this data set. Also, note that only the first five rows are listed because of the LIMIT command. The code and output is below.

SELECT * 

FROM Seasons_Stats 

order by Age DESC 

LIMIT 5

From the output, it appears that Kevin Willis is the oldest player to play in the NBA since 1950. The DESC argument next to ORDER BY sorts the results from highest to lowest.

Conclusion

There is much more to learn about SQL than what was shared here. However, the most important thing to know whenever doing a data analyst is to make sure you know what you want to know. This involves developing straightforward questions that can be answered with available tools.