CHAPTER 9 - Tapping emotion

Words are powerful, they have the power to wound or heal, discourage or encourage, tear down or build up. In the chapter “Tapping emotion” it talks about educators and presenters can make emotions stick like mental Post-it notes because all emotions have sticking potential (157). We, as educators, have the opportunity to store our student’s emotions with positive and healing images that our students and our audiences can take with them for life (174). Dr. Burmark shares Truman’s list of feeling words that has negatives words that could be replaced with positive words. Immediately I noticed that there exist a lot more positive words than negative ones. If we all would choose to use more positive words every day, we would make people change by giving them a sparkle of energy in their daily life. One way to make an emotion to stick is to show images in our presentations. It is said that images are worth a thousand words, because by looking at an image, one can captivate large amounts of information and feelings. Dr. Burmark shares some photographs taken by Lewis W. Hine, where he documented child labor in America (163). To be honest, I never paid closed attention to this part of history before; I read about it, processed the information but that was it. While I was reading this chapter and I looked at the photographs, it made my heart skipped a beat. Meaning, this photographs were sticking an emotion by adding a mental Post-it note. While looking at these photographs, I felt very sad. The information given, connected with the kids’ faces in the pictures. Now I understand more about this sad part of U.S. history. Dr. Burmark says that students can have the same impact. Showing images can make an emotion stick. There are many kids in our school who carry a lot of home problems at school. They often need uplifting words of encouraging to healing their feelings. To do this, we could let the students write a positive words/feeling list and let them search for images where they can express and completely understand certain feeling. These images could give the students a richer, deeper understanding of the potential of positive feelings (171). We want our students to leave the classroom feeling better than when they came in. As Dr. Burmark suggests, we need to respond with positive images, images to uplift the weary and heal the walking wounded (173).

Burmark, L. (2011). They snooze you lose: The educator’s guide to successful presentations. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.