Who you are and how you treat others is the crux of teaching. Teaching, especially the kind that lasts all year and includes a teacher and a classroom of children, is about relationship. Discipline in the classroom is about relationship, and this class takes a close look at that, because pro-active discipline is all about the way a group of people think about being together, about learning and about keeping things safe and at the same time, stimulating and learning centered. This kind of being together is called pro-active, and the core is self knowledge.

That self knowledge is difficult. People are interesting. We have the ability to understand ourselves and to hide from ourselves. We do not come with gauges, so we can be over heated, angry
and not recognize how we are behaving, even deny it when asked. "No, I'm not mad at you, stupid!"

We can be cool and d i s t a n t with others and not realize we have made a change in approach; not see that we are hiding something or keeping emotions at bay.

We may say things and forget them, or forget to say them and think we did.

We are a real puzzle! The astonishing part? Many of us don't even see how much we don't see.

The teen who asks "Who am I" is verbalizing what all of us wonder, as we reflect on the things we do, the ways we behave every day. We often feel walled away from our own feelings and we certainly construct boundaries to preserve dignity, privacy, to feel safe and to believe we have some control over what we share of ourselves.

That wall is a comfort and a frustration. We can most often ignore it. When we work to achieve self understanding, it bothers us since it becomes more visible and we want to be able to view ourselves. If it comes crashing down, it leaves us too vulnerable.

The same thing happens when we want to understand someone else. We disclose, they disclose, and yet, there are things we cannot share about ourselves and things we don't even know we don't know about ourselves and others.

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