 Neuroscience now gets it that this is where you start but also I think in education we some teachers have always got it that the main thing is to figure out how to motivate the kids and everything else will come easy after that and so there's a recognition on our part too that we need to put it up front to say that how we engage kids is the hard part of education how do we make sure that all 25 kids are engaged in ways that are productive is really hard and just to I guess pre pre where we're going actually I want to stop for a second say this is a major change at cast we came in as sort of technology smart people and neuroscience smart people and you still always think of sort of information and skills as what we're really about and teachers need to give kids information and build their skills but the more we've worked here the last few hires we've made a cast or people who are entirely in affective neuroscience or affective technology kind of stuff because it's so important and now the words we're using and it will come out in the new book we put this is the first in the new book that hopefully and you'll be able to get for free online so you don't have to buy it but affect will be first in talking about it and we'll use the the following term which is really making sense to all of us a lot which is that the hardest part of teaching is the emotional work and I'm just trying to think whether I'll be able to say this later so I want to say it now I think that people think of it as intellectual work and as apprentice kind of skill development work but the hardest part is the emotional work and that is how do I engage my students meaning how do I understand what they're going through how do I know what's hard enough and not too hard what's why is Billy obviously not engaged why is he looking sad today what's gone wrong these things are what this part of our nervous system does and it's very consuming and I want to say some experiments that happened in psychiatry but they would absolutely pertain in education in psychiatry they did studies of people who were treating trauma victims people psychiatrists who were seeing people who came from the worst situations rapes murders the whole cultural what's the word for that when you wipe out a whole culture what is it yes that this is the worst of it and when they mentioned them physiologically and you know what's happening that they were mirroring and we'll talk about how they do that probably not till tomorrow they were mirroring the bad events that had happened to their patients and what it meant was that they were feeling them inside their own brain mirroring meaning I'm feeling it too and that that requires a tremendous amount of energy and commitment from the nervous system because it is really replaying the rape replaying the murder of a child all of that and the brain is really doing it the only way you can empathize with someone is to essentially replay it have and feel the affect so when they measure them they'd see that oh my god they're going through it sorry the good psychiatrists were going through it and by the end of the day they were completely exhausted and what they found out was that they quickly became bad psychiatrists because they were replete they'd run out of the capacity to do this emotional work and had to send them away on leave and now in the army when they're having these trauma things they're making a lot of leaves for psychiatrists not like three months from now but every few days because they can't keep doing that level of emotional work and what they do is they become non empathizers because they're out of it they're out of it they're not able to do it so I like to say and I think it's absolutely true that that's why teachers need summer vacations because if you're good at your job you are doing emotional work and it is draining and I remember when I taught head start you know the content was not hard I knew my colors I knew my numbers this was it was intellectually not demanding but it was emotionally very demanding as every kid was vulnerable in some way and I was hospitalized at the end of a summer of head start because I kept trying to go without you know a break and now I know if they'd measured me they would have realized oh my god it's not the intellectual challenge of this job he's emotionally spent he's out of any more energy that he can put to this task and that's why you know I think I know that there's a agrarian reason why you need summer off so you can bring in the hay but in fact I think you need the summer to restore your affective resources because this is a hard job now some of you don't because you're bad teachers I don't know if you're here which case you know you should work all summer but if we if we measured you and said you know what this is a teacher that's been doing emotional work then nine months is probably as much as you could do and you need to take a break restore yourself go to Lake Louise with me and Ruth you know and enjoy yourselves okay so let's talk about this very important part of the brain with which you do emotional work center parts of the brain what it does it monitors the internal and external environment to set priorities and to motivate learning and behavior all right what does it mean to monitor the internal it monitors things and that's why it's right in the center of your brain it's got to know how much sugar we got anyway how much oxygen have we got anyway so you have sensors that aren't you know looking at the Eiffel Tower and that picture they're looking inside your body to say where are we where are we as a surviving organism do we have what we need to survive so that's happening here down the hypothalamus you probably heard about this so it's literally measuring nutrients all that kind of stuff to say haven't got enough so that you can survive and propagate okay and so it's measuring the internal environment but it's also measuring things like the stress you're under how much of your muscles are depleted etc measuring all sorts of things about you your internal state what's going on with you because it mainly wants to keep you alive and keep you so that you can propagate make little use somewhere else okay and it also though monitors the external environment to say okay you need food like crazy and what's not a new you need food then it what it does is it guides to make food more important to look at so in that picture I gave that example this part of the brain says look for food you dummy look for it so it starts to motivate you so food becomes much more important if we feed you everything you need to keep feeding you food becomes less and less important and this is the part of the brain then it stops saying okay don't look for food anymore we've had enough start looking for sex okay whatever look for something else monitor what's in the external environment to match it up to what you need now okay so this is this internal and an external environment to make a good match everybody with me on this so far okay and from an educational standpoint we're gonna be arguing later that new media provides more options for how do we not about food and sex and things like that but how do we work on engagement so more kids are engaged and we'll talk about principles and guidelines for ways in which we recruit interest ways we sustain it and ways that we help kids to get so they can self-regulate these are options that we need to build into our environment so kids get better at being able to be engaged and lastly get so that they can engage themselves you don't want to keep engaging your kids shouldn't be your job to try to interest them all the time it needs to be at the beginning but later kids need to be able to be self-engaging to say I want to do this and I'm going to work at it really hard that's what we want to get so this is a little bit of hyperbole but I just made this slide actually last night to say learning is not the hard part engagement